The title of a new book from artist Faye Wei Wei takes its name from the shade of green used to create the drawing on its front cover: Hooker’s Green Lake. “It’s by Old Holland and is so strange and mesmerising as a colour, it sinks into paper so nicely and it leaks its binding oils out and becomes quite swampy,” Wei Wei explains over email, ahead of the book’s publication by Éditions Lutanie, with support from London’s Cob Gallery. “I like the idea of looking out onto a green lake, and with that intensity of pigment it has to be a lake at night, possibly viewed by moonlight.”
Faye Wei Wei: “The drawings mostly came about from this year, during lockdown. My friend Dora passed away and it made a big hole in my heart. And so I just would draw and just fill leaf after leaf with love and felt a hunger for a new language,” she says. “I was transfixed into making and the drawings surprised me – they feel unexpected, they were born from real pain, but a real love too.” Tinged with the ache of separation and loss, the drawings in Hooker’s Green Lake take on a new tenderness. “You can’t possibly help but think about the people you love when you draw, it comes out before you even know what you feel, there is a magic in that I really believe in.”
With thanks to AnOther Magazine