The gate between....

 

Yesterday we were in the Archeon, a museum site where houses from different ages in the past are rebuilt and filled with the materials the people used in these days. One of the big attractions of that museum is, that there are volunteers and professional historians dressed like the people of the era in question and giving lots of information about daily life in that time. Every year we meet other people, telling new tales about life in the past so revisiting is a great experience.

There is a place in the park where you can sit down in a modern playground - having lunch or waiting for playing children - and look through a gate into the scenes of the Iron Age.

While sketching the gate, I had a 'What if' moment and decided to paint that gate as if it really was a gate between the ages.

Everything behind the gate is misty and unknown, even the sky is grey, while the sky that can be seen above the gate is blue and the trees and bushes beside it are painted in shades of green. Because I wanted to suggest a distant, misty scene with bushes on the other side of the gate it may look like the fence on the left is continued in that landscape. These coincidences are only too common in a flat landscape like ours and only the grey and blurred shades that are behind the gate show the differences between the landscape that is behind the gate and the landscape that is on this side.

In the end I think that these 'happy accidents' add to the mystery of the gate. 

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this painting and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.