Scenes from a Parallel Universe: Five Coloured Pencil Drawings by Rhea Mack
Drawing 2— Pink Moon Patrol
In the world of Rhea Mack’s coloured pencil drawings, things look familiar — until they don’t. People pose like family portraits, but their faces multiply. A skeleton holds flowers. A wizard waits by a fence. The colours are soft, almost pastel, but the mood hums with oddness and tenderness.
These drawings feel like postcards from a parallel universe — not one built to escape reality, but to gently rearrange it. To slow it down. To show how strange it already is.
Kyst Gallery presents a study of five drawings — not to explain them, but to spend time inside them.
Two figures stand elbow to elbow beneath a floating, blotched pink moon. Their bodies are long, softened by robes that shimmer in sherbet tones, their pale green hands hanging neatly at their sides, fingers delicate and strangely elegant. They are dressed like ceremonial guardians — not quite soldiers, not quite priests. Each one wears an epaulet, gold and slightly silly, like something a child might draw when imagining authority.
But what gives them their charge — their quiet intensity — is not their costume.
It’s their eyes.
Each of them has two pairs.
Two pairs of eyes. One stacked above the other. Four pupils per face. A gaze that doubles. Sees further. Or maybe just sees differently. Not sharper — but deeper. As if to do this job, to stand in this place beneath this moon, you must be able to perceive both what is seen and what is unseen. The visible and the almost.
The title — Pink Moon Patrol — sounds like a band, or a children’s book, or a sci-fi lullaby. It disarms. But the longer you look, the more it feels like a ritual. A duty. The patrol does not move. It does not search. It stands, elbow to elbow, in quiet witness.
The moon above them is massive and softly marbled. Its texture is too strange for realism, but too gentle to be eerie. It hovers — not as a backdrop, but as a presence. Behind them, the sky is pastel pink. In front of them, a ridge of flora — a low hill or strange garden — is filled with coral stalks ending in blinking red eyes. These are not flowers.
They are lookers.
The landscape itself is conscious.
Everything in this drawing is watching.
And somehow, the patrol is not in charge — they are simply participating. Participating in the act of attention. They remind one of the lamplighter from The Little Prince — faithful to a quiet, repetitive task that no longer has a reason but still holds meaning. The figures don’t speak. They simply stand — so that the moon can rise, the plants can bloom, the scene can hold.
“It may well be that this man is absurd. But he is not so absurd as the king, the conceited man, the businessman, and the tippler. For at least his work has some meaning. When he lights his street lamp, it is as if he brought one more star to life, or one flower. When he puts out his lamp, he sends the flower, or the star, to sleep. That is a beautiful occupation. And since it is beautiful, it is truly useful.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Rhea Mack often draws characters who don’t do anything in the traditional sense. They wait. They pose. They dream. But in that stillness, there’s power. Her use of coloured pencil — soft, layered, meticulous — matches the mood. The drawing itself doesn’t move fast. It settles. It glows gently, like something remembered from long ago and half-wrong.
The four eyes, the floating hands, the echo between the two figures — it all adds up to something that can’t be fully explained.
And that’s the point.
Not all patrols need purpose.
Some just keep watch, so that a strange pink moon can keep rising.
Massachusetts Dreaming: The Surrealistic World of Rhea Mack runs from 11 April to 8 May 2025.
