wildscape. literary journal

Title: Seastorm // Artist: Camellia Paul

about the piece

This piece is created using soft pastel, and diluted watercolor on textured paper, allowing the surface grain to remain visible and active. I worked from broad atmospheric washes outward, laying down the sea and sky with wet-on-wet watercolor, then dragging graphite and charcoal through the damp surface to blur horizons and soften edges. The figures were added last in darker, denser strokes, deliberately simplified and silhouetted so they emerge from the landscape rather than dominate it. I used smudging, erasure, and repeated reworking of the sky to build the weight of the approaching storm, letting marks remain unfinished and wind-swept. The work is about companionship in uncertainty—two bodies standing at the threshold of something vast, restless, and uncontrollable. The sea here is not romanticized; it is heavy, cold, and indifferent, while the storm above mirrors emotional turbulence rather than literal weather. Holding hands becomes a quiet, defiant gesture: not safety, but presence. I wanted the figures to feel small without feeling erased, and the world to feel expansive without becoming abstract. What I want the world to know is that this drawing was made slowly and attentively, with a willingness to let the image stay unresolved. It reflects my interest in liminal spaces—shorelines, storms, pauses before change—and my belief that intimacy often lives most honestly in moments where nothing is promised except standing still together.

about the artist // Camellia Paul