Velvet Valley unfolds from a memory of landscape rather than a literal view. The scene brings together fragments of places I have travelled through – desert edges, palm-lined riverbeds, distant hills – and reassembles them into a terrain that feels familiar without ever quite being identifiable. The soft, almost luminous cacti in the foreground, the winding blue river and the clustered palms together create a valley that is less about geography and more about an inner climate: a place of heat, distance and quiet longing.
The work was created while I was reflecting on my experiences in North Africa, especially Morocco, and on how those journeys stayed with me afterwards, changed by time and emotion. Instead of painting from photographs, I deliberately allowed the details to blur and slip. The result is a landscape that carries traces of those environments – desert plants, oases, distant villages – but filtered through memory and imagination. The unusual colour palette, with its velvety greens, yellows and pinks against a surreal green sky, rejects naturalistic description and aims instead to evoke the feeling of standing in such a place at the edge of day, when light flattens details and the world becomes almost dreamlike.
The title, Velvet Valley, speaks to both touch and distance. “Velvet” suggests softness, thickness, a surface you want to reach out and feel; “valley” implies depth and separation – a place you can look across but not easily cross. That tension between intimacy and remoteness runs through the work: the plants are close, almost tactile, but the hills and trees recede into a hazy elsewhere. This echoes my broader practice, which is concerned with longing, belonging and the impossibility of ever fully returning to the places we have left.
Within my overall body of work, Velvet Valley is representative in several ways. I consistently work with landscapes that sit between observation and invention, often combining elements from different locations into a single image that feels true emotionally rather than topographically. I use bold, unexpected colour to disrupt photographic logic, drawing more on memory and mood than on direct reference. The composition – foreground vegetation framing a middle-distance waterway and distant hills – reflects my ongoing interest in how we look through things: through plants, windows, courtyards or thresholds, toward a space that is always slightly out of reach.
Across my practice I think of each painting as a kind of self-portrait in disguise: a record of the places I have moved through and the inner states they’ve left behind. Velvet Valley condenses that approach into a single image. It is a fictional valley, but one stitched together from real experiences, travel, and a persistent sense of searching for home in landscapes that are both welcoming and strange. In that sense, it stands as a clear expression of my ongoing exploration of memory, movement and the fragile, shifting idea of where we belong.
If you can tell me roughly how many characters or words the Luxembourg Art Prize form allows for this answer, I can tighten or expand this to fit perfectly—and we can also tune the art-historical/philosophical references up or down depending on how academic you want to sound.
