Watercolours

I went with Jane to see the new Watercolours exhibition at Tate Britain nearly two weeks ago. It covers a huge range of works, from ancient illustrated manuscripts with elaborate birds and foliage, botanical illustrations, through the expected landscapes in pale shades, but also some unexpected ones, like Charles Rennie Machintosh's 'Fetges', which had a clarity and rhythm to its huddle of grey houses that was alot livelier than my description!




Mackintosh 'Fetges' c1927




Melville 'The Blue Night, Venice' 1897

 

Then larger pre-raphaelites, which looked fussy and static (Arthur Melville's 'The Blue Night, Venice' being an atmospheric exception), aspects of war (Ute Wittwer's 'Ruin' - large black and white scene of bomb damage) to more modern and abstract work, including Andy Goldsworthy's trace of one of his melting snowballs, full of earth. His work always has that ring of truth to me; letting nature do the talking.

I was struck by Jenny Franklin's 'Sourced Earth: Regeneration'; puddles of yellow ochre and black looking like cactus shadows. As always for me it's that combination of chance and intention.





Jenny Franklin - from her website. Not the work on show, but similar

 I also stopped in front of  Rebecca Salter's grey and black panel which looked like watered silk, but was aparently made by dragging a  chopstick loaded with black colour across the grey ground.

Anish Kapoor's Untitled 1990, below, has that intensity of pigment that he so masters - nothing could be redder, or blacker. But I read that this is gouache, not watercolour. So does it really belong here?


Anish Kapoor Untitled 1990

And although it is more than 150 years old, Turner's 'The Blue Rigi, Sunrise' of 1842  has such power and atmosphere, I just had to stop and stare. There is something so modern in his hints of form and looseness of application and yet you feel that you could have been there, standing next to him, and it would have looked just like that. We were on a Swiss lake two summers ago. I wish I'd got up before sunrise to see this sight. Or then again, is it all his invention? I think I read that he worked mostly in the studio.



Turner ' The Blue Rigi, Sunrise'

Looking for photos to add to this blog on the Tate website and came across the video of John Squire doing a mix of printing and painting. Look here: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/watercolour/default.shtm. (Sorry uploading videos is beyond my blogging capabilities at the moment) I want to do stuff like that...

Time to get the paints out...but I always say that....