Finding Paths, Blue Edition by Alantherock: Every Path Leaves the Frame

Finding Paths, Blue Edition is an abstract art print of pale routes branching across a deep slate blue ground. Not one of those routes begins or ends inside the picture. Each arrives at an edge and leaves at an edge, so what you are given is a middle stretch of a journey whose start and finish sit somewhere off the sheet.

Finding Paths, Blue Edition by Alan Pedersen, Alantherock is a mixed media abstract art print. Branching pale lines cross a slate blue ground, with three coloured discs set among them. It is made with acrylic paint, coffee painting, watercolour, drawing, texture and photographs, and printed on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g in three sizes.

Every path runs off the edge of the sheet

Not one line in this picture begins or ends inside it. Lines run off the top of the sheet, off the left edge, off the right, and the longest of them travels down through the centre and out through the bottom. Wherever a line stops being visible, it is because the paper has run out, not because the path has.

What the picture does hold is junctions. The lines meet and split at several points across the sheet, and each fork is a place where the route could have gone another way. There is no arrow, no marked start, nothing that ranks one branch above another. The composition supplies every condition you need in order to choose, and withholds the one thing that would let you finish.

The product page opens by asking whether you have found your path, and which path you prefer. The picture declines to answer, and the refusal is the work. A path with a visible destination is a route. A path that leaves the frame in both directions is still a path, and it is the only kind most of us are ever actually standing on.

Three discs, and the one mark that stops

Three coloured discs sit among the lines, and no two are made the same way. The largest, upper left, is a dusty rose you can see straight through, and inside it are soft blue greens, browns and pale whites, like weather held behind glass. A narrow rose stem runs down from its base and joins the network below. The second, to the right, is flat opaque sand with no depth in it at all. The third, low on the left, is the palest of them, a soft grey circle with a ring brushed inside it by hand and a dark smudge beneath.

From the base of the sand disc a single brown drip runs down and stops in open ground. It is the only mark in the picture that ends where it chose to. Everything else either leaves the sheet or was already sitting there. The drip is what the paint did on its own while it was still wet, and it is the plainest evidence that this began as a physical object rather than a file: acrylic, coffee, watercolour, drawing and photographed texture, layered over several months.

There is no horizon and no scale here, so the picture never settles into one viewpoint. Read it one way and you are above a map, looking down at routes and pools of colour. Read it the other way and you are beneath branches, looking up at canopies against a flat evening sky. The drip only makes sense from below. The junctions only make sense from above. Both readings hold for the whole sheet, and Alan Pedersen has said he wants the observer to build their own story out of it.

Four editions, and why the choosing is part of the piece

Finding Paths exists as four separate prints: Blue, Dark Green, Rose and Grey. They are one drawing four times over, every disc and every junction holding its exact position. What changes is the ground beneath them, and in one case rather more than that. In Blue, Rose and Grey the paths are the lightest thing in the picture, pale channels across a darker field. In the Dark Green edition they invert. The lines go dark against the green, and the network that led the eye everywhere else now has to be looked for.

The four versions were not a decision made after the fact. Alan Pedersen built them into the work and said so when the series was first shown in 2020: four versions exist to emphasise that there are always several paths and opportunities to follow, and that by choosing one you have already taken the first step. The decision the shop asks you to make is the same decision the picture is about.

The print comes in three sizes, and the largest changes what you notice first. At 30x40 cm the discs dominate and the routes read as background. At 70x100 cm the lines come forward, the slight waver in them becomes visible, the hand behind them shows, and the picture turns into something you follow rather than something you look at. Lost Feathers, another Alantherock print, works the same territory from a different angle, holding its subject in the space between rising and falling instead of settling it.

Most pictures about journeys show an arrival. A road narrowing to a point, a light at the end, a figure on a summit. This one gives you a slate blue field, a handful of forks, and a set of routes that were already running before the sheet began and carry on after it stops.

It is a calm picture to live with, and a quietly restless one. That is the honest condition of being partway.

About Finding Paths, Blue Edition

What paper is Finding Paths, Blue Edition printed on?
It is printed on Fine Art Freja paper, 265 g, chosen to hold the depth of the slate ground and the discs. The original was built from acrylic paint, coffee painting, watercolour and drawing, combined with texture, photographs and graphic shapes. The frame shown in the product images is for illustration and is not included.

What sizes does this print come in?
Three sizes: 30x40 cm, 50x70 cm and 70x100 cm. The largest brings the path network forward, so the hand drawn irregularity in the lines becomes part of what you see rather than something you have to look for.

What is the difference between the four Finding Paths editions?
Blue, Dark Green, Rose and Grey are the same drawing on four grounds, with every disc and every junction holding its exact position. In Blue, Rose and Grey the paths are the palest element in the picture. In the Dark Green edition the lines invert and read dark against the ground.

Is Finding Paths, Blue Edition signed, and is it a limited edition?
Each print is marked with Alan Pedersen, Alantherock's signature. It is not listed among NOKUKO's limited editions, which are held in a separate collection. Finding Paths is sold as four separate editions, so the Blue Edition is one of four ways to own the same drawing.

Written by  NOKUKO.