A fancy flying saucer with a huge extraterrestrial tourist group on board is very close to Earth, the final destination on their having-fun-in-the-most-dumb-places-in-the-universe journey. Some 7,000 metres from the alien ground, suddenly this cloud comes, which at first glance is soft and fluffy, but a second later aggressively ominous. As a result the flying saucer becomes imprisoned by the cloud, and it will remain there for another 72 hours when, thanks to a passing paratrooper, it will be released (the cloud will seize the paratrooper instead). By that time all extraterrestrial tourists will be so bored that they will force the pilots to turn the ship back and head towards their remote and very beautiful planet. The paratrooper will also be released after 12 hours, 33 minutes and 17 seconds because of the heavy rain the cloud produces in order the keep the Earth’s ecological balance (and because one of the cloud’s favorite weather ladies from a small television network somewhere in southern Europe said that it will rain in that area). By that time the jumper’s parachute will be bored too.
For quite some time I have resisted making watercolours again. My last proper ones
were done some twenty years ago. Meanwhile, I more or less mastered my relatively well-known “sepia, black and white ink, and wash on 850-gram paper” drawings, which in general were produced in series containing 7, 9, 12 and even up to 99 and 123 works. I made thousands. And then, just like that, in late October 2016, I put some protective white sheets on my second table, which I always kept clean, placed a jar of water on it, dug out my old watercolour brushes and paints, and just started painting on the same heavy paper. It was a kind of revelation when I again discovered the obvious - that the colour adds a dimension which I could not achieve with the ink, even though sometimes the sepia, black and white, and wash give the sense of polychromy. And then, step by step, story by story, colour after colour - or rather, on top of each other - the “Stories in Colour” came to light. Some of the stories are still a bit sad and perhaps not so optimistic, and my sense of humour may have become more like a middle-aged man’s as well, which in my case means more childish. Which is okay, I guess.
Nedko Solakov
February 2017