Windblown Beneath the Stars

Windblown Beneath the Stars begins with a face caught mid turn, hair torn sideways by a wind that never quite settles, curls unraveling into the dark. Everything soft in the original drawing has been reduced to two states only, the light that survives and the black that does not, so what remains is a face built entirely out of restraint.

Nothing here was added. Every strand of hair, every fleck of light across the cheekbone, every small point scattered like frost or falling snow was taken away from a solid field of blue, not drawn onto it. That is the quiet discipline of this series, the image appears through removal, through a field of individual marks and controlled scratches cut into the surface rather than any pigment or print laid over it.

The glass is a deep, cold blue, and that colour is not decoration here. Blue is night sky and open air, the colour of distance and of holding still against a wind that wants to move you, and it settles around this figure the way memory settles around a moment you were sure would blow away and somehow didn't.

From across the room the face reads whole, monumental, caught in that one suspended instant. Step closer and it dissolves into a field of fine scratches and scattered points, a private constellation that only resolves back into a face once you step away again, the same way stars only become a sky from a distance.

The image is always there, with or without direct light, it does not vanish and it is never switched on. What changes is only what light does to it, under a stronger glow the scratches catch and shine and the contrast deepens, and around the figure the room itself, and you, drift into the mirrored blue, so that looking at her means finding yourself caught in the same wind.

Windblown Beneath the Stars continues the Art on Mirror series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which scratched imagery is set into coloured mirror glass and the viewer becomes part of the work, a visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure, and where the mirror turns looking into taking part.

"Some faces are not lit. They are uncovered."

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