The volcanic eruption shook the United States: fifty-seven people and thousands of animals died, millions of tons of ash were ejected into the air within seconds, and hundreds of square kilometres were turned into wasteland. The mountain, a symbol of stability, set loose an explosion that violently dislodged one third of its mass – and not in Hawaii or Alaska, but on the contiguous mainland of the United States during the Cold War. This set the emotional tenor of news and media reports, with headlines that declared “Sleeping Beauty turned Killer”, “A diary of destruction”, or “The Day the Earth stood still”.

Photos and videos of this natural disaster began to fascinate Markus Draper in 2007. In the same year, he chose the peculiar formations of the ash clouds as a motif for the first time; to this day, they have sporadically though repeatedly served him as the subject of his paintings.

Draper’s painting style is characterised by glazing, the layered application of translucent oil paints. After finding the motif, he breaks down images of if that he has taken from the media into individual colour fields, which he transfers to the canvas with a brush – usually employing only one shade of colour, which varies from light to dark. What is crucial here for achieving a dense image is the precise transfer of tonal values. He then often finishes the canvas by covering it with a full colour glaze.

It is important to the artist that his paintings cannot be “located” at any one place (More Than a Story, 2020; Hard to Say, 2021; Killing Me Softly, 2021). “My pictures aren’t meant to reflect any concrete event. They don’t refer to any danger that could be localised at a specific time or place. Rather, they express a general feeling of insecurity, a kind of social diagnosis: they reflect a sense of unease, diffuse fears and anxieties that cannot be connected to specific causes. But they also express a kind of critique: perhaps it is more comfortable to remain in a state of fear than to act to change things.”