Finding Paths, Grey Edition by Alantherock: The Quietest of the Four

Finding Paths, Grey Edition is an abstract art print of white branching paths and three grey discs on a pale grey ground, and it is the quietest of the four Finding Paths editions. The other three tell you where the paths are before you have looked for them. This one lets you arrive at the discs first, and only then notice that a route has been running under them the whole time.

Finding Paths, Grey Edition by Alan Pedersen, Alantherock is a mixed media abstract art print, one of four editions of the same drawing. White lines branch across a pale grey ground beneath three discs in three different greys. It is printed on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g in three sizes.

The faintest paths of the four editions

In the Grey Edition the paths are white lines on a pale grey ground, and the gap between the two is the smallest anywhere in the series. In the Blue Edition the same lines sit on deep slate and are the brightest thing on the sheet. In Dark Green they turn near black. In Rose they are white on dusty pink. Here the ground is already close to white, so the lines read as a slightly lighter grey running through a slightly darker one, and from across a room they come and go.

The network has not changed. Every junction is where it was: the long line down the centre, the branch that comes in from the top right, the two that run out through the left edge, the one that leaves low on the right. What has changed is how much the picture insists on it. The three other editions put the route in front of you. This one leaves it under your feet.

In the note that introduced the series in 2020, Alan Pedersen wrote that some paths we choose, and others "choose us instead of the other way around". The Grey Edition is the one that shows what that looks like. You do not pick a line and follow it. You look at the discs, you look at the weather inside the largest of them, and somewhere in that looking you find you have been standing on a path all along.

Three greys: one cool, one warm, one plain

The three discs in this edition are three different greys, told apart by how dark they are and by which way they lean. The largest, upper left, is the darkest mark on the sheet and the only one that leans cool. Its surface is the cloud texture that runs through every edition, and in grey it reads as weather, a storm seen from above, with faint traces of blue still held in it.

The second disc, on the right, is a warm grey, closer to stone than to cloud, brushed rather than clouded, with a single dark stroke curling over its upper edge like a shadow that stayed. The third, low on the left, is the palest of the three and has no lean at all, a flat grey with a ring brushed inside it by hand. Dark, mid, light: the discs sit in a tonal order that colour used to hide. In Blue the top disc is paler than the ground around it. Here it is the darkest thing in the picture and the paths are the lightest, so the whole sheet is organised from dark to light rather than from one colour to the next.

Each disc drips in its own grey. The storm disc sends two dark drips down towards the central line, and the stone disc drips three times, the longest reaching the branch below it. The loose blots scattered across the ground, one beside the top disc, one below the left junction, one inside the pale disc and two near the foot of the central line, are in every edition too. Here they are made of the same grey as everything else, so they stop reading as spills of colour and start reading as part of the drawing.

Grey on a pale wall, and the three sizes

The Grey Edition is the one to choose for a room with light walls, where the other three would be the loudest thing in it. In the product photographs it hangs on a pale grey wall above a grey sofa and nearly matches the wall, so the discs seem to float in the room rather than inside a picture. In a black frame on a pale wooden desk, the frame does the work the slate ground does in Blue, and the white paths show up again against it.

The print comes in three sizes, 30x40 cm, 50x70 cm and 70x100 cm, each printed on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g and marked with Alan Pedersen, Alantherock's signature. The frame shown in the photographs is for illustration and is not included.

Grey is the third of the four editions NOKUKO has written about. Finding Paths, Blue Edition follows the network out to the edges of the sheet, and Finding Paths, Dark Green Edition follows the two colours that travel down the central line. All four were first introduced together in Alan's own note on the series in 2020, where he explains why one drawing exists in four versions.

Three editions show you the path and ask which one you would take. This one shows you the weather, the stone and the pale ring first, and lets the path turn up afterwards, faint and already underfoot.

It is the gentlest print of the four, and the one that rewards living with. The lines come and go with the light in the room, and the picture never quite settles on which of its three greys is the subject.

About Finding Paths, Grey Edition

What paper is Finding Paths, Grey Edition printed on?
It is printed on Fine Art Freja paper, 265 g, which holds the pale ground and the soft greys of the discs without flattening them. The original was made from acrylic paint, coffee painting, watercolour and drawing, combined with texture, photographs and graphic shapes. The frame shown in the product images is not included.

What sizes does the Grey Edition come in?
Three sizes: 30x40 cm, 50x70 cm and 70x100 cm. All four Finding Paths editions are offered in the same three sizes.

How is the Grey Edition different from the other Finding Paths editions?
All four editions are the same drawing, with every disc and junction in the same place. Grey is the only edition with no colour in its ground. Its three discs are three greys, one cool, one warm and one plain, and its white paths sit on a pale ground, so they are the faintest in the series.

Is Finding Paths, Grey Edition signed, and is it a limited edition?
Each print is marked with Alan Pedersen, Alantherock's signature. It is an open edition rather than one of NOKUKO's limited editions, and as a print it does not come with a certificate of authenticity, which NOKUKO issues for original paintings.