Gallery Visit: Watercolour Now

The new build has rejuvenated more than the fabric of the Keep. It has re-invigorated what was once a rather lonely visitor experience, trudging up the hill to the castle, entering through what seemed an impossibly tiny front door to edge forward to the (gulp!)'reception desk', where the always friendly and informative staff would gently let you know that the exhibit you had come to see had been lent to a touring show the week before, or a leak in the roof had meant they had to close the show and...

Consequently in the last twelve years, as locals, we've probably been no more than two or three times, and we have not been able to recommend visitors go and spend time there. Despite the best efforts of thoroughly committed staff, it has always had an air of an under-resourced institution within the city.

It is therefore with some relief, after such a massive investment of public money that the refurbishment is such a vast improvement on what was there before. The new spaces are already welcoming visitors to Norwich. On the day we visited the building was buzzing, and visitors were genuinely excited with the prospect of what they were about to see.

The architectural quality of the interior materials are reassuringly high, although some of the exhibits on the upper floors are a little homely, and while aimed at younger visitors, they need to be made less dominant among the other exhibits that are of more adult interest and share these spaces.

Overall though, great imagination has been employed in keeping the sense of the ancient structure of the Keep intact, the new staircases carry a consistent architectural presence between the levels, and contrast well with the dressed stone.

Lighting has been employed to great effect in a theatrical presentation on the lower floors of previous built structures that no longer exist, the volumes of each room in relation to the exhibits has been nicely judged.

The whole feel of the interior is generous and although architecturally restrained, it is quietly impressive. We will post more about the successes of the outcomes in a dedicated post about the new facilities at the museum and what visitors can expect once some of the creases have been ironed out.

While we were curious to experience the new extended museum for ourselves, we really wanted to catch an exhibition that has been thoughtfully assembled by the artist Simon Carter, titled Watercolour Now. Held upstairs in the Timothy Gurney Gallery, the exhibition includes work by eight artists who think of watercolour is a crucial part of their painting practice and not a bygone medium favoured by amateurs.

Each artist employs this light-weight, quick, way of describing an image in a different manner, showing how watercolour can free-up their way of working. Enabling them to describe often fleeting relationships with light, colour, landscape and art history.

The contributing artists are: Simon Carter, Christopher Le Brun, Alf Löhr, Barbara Nicholls, Melanie Russell, Mark Stewart, Charlotte Verity and James Faure Walker.

The artists have also selected watercolours from the collections held at the museum. We did not have time to see their selection. It is possible that they could have been influenced by those pieces from the collections in what they exhibted, however, it is not essential to see the collection in order to understand the exhibition.

Watercolour Now is one of those quietly successful group exhibitions that grows on you as you delve deeper into what each artist has brought to the table. Some of the pieces on show are really impressive, not just for being watercolours...

Simon Carter is a painter based on the coast near Frinton in Essex. He has sustained a career as an artist for several decades. He has curated the Watercolour Now exhibition. The axis of the exhibition has been designed through his personal experience of the medium. His striking watercolours are displayed as a series of studies in a grid-like sequence, bringing order to what he sees as both topographic short-hand, as well as relational representations of water, sky,land, and buildings. We have shown his larger canvases, as well as watercolours on several occasions during the last four years, so can declare an interest in this show as we appreciate his approach to landscape.

Simon Carter is well-respected by his fellow artists and is co-founder of the artist collective Contemporary British Painting. He is also president of Colchester Art Society and has developed his own curatorial projects, like this show. He was also co-curator of Life with Art: Benton End and the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Firstsite, in Colchester, Essex and he curates exhibitions at Oasis, a community space in his home town of Frinton. He is represented by Messum's - David Messums Fine Art.

Sir Christopher Le Brun PPRA is a British artist, known for his large-scale paintings. He was President of the Royal Academy of Arts from 2011 to 2019, and was trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. His work has moved between media - painting, print and sculpture over the decades, since he started exhibiting internationally from the early 1980s onwards. The watercolours he is showing here blend text and images, each of the five landscapes refer to landscape painting established by artists with secure places in art history: Turner, Constable, Pissaro etc. They reference places that might be on a grand tour, nuanced in the handling of the paint, carefully built up over time to such an extent that areas of the paper appear quite dark. The transparency that the medium usually brings to their subject matter almost lost. However, through this unusually dense build-up of pigment, they do give off a sense of authoritative and assured historicisation. The employment of text as a part of each composition reminds me of the work of the late Tom Phillips, who often placed text centrally in his imagery. Le Brun's calm, ordered paintings are really the keystone of this show. Looking forward as well as back in time. He is married to Charlotte Verity, who is also a contributor to the exhibition.

Alf Löhr is an internationally known artist born in Germany, who has spent a period living and working in the USA, before returning to Europe. He has been based in the UK for a while, now. His large, framed, free-flowing abstracts follow techniques pursued by earlier generations of German artists, like Sigmar Polke (1941 - 2010). It is no accident that Löhr trained at Düsseldorf Arts Academy, where years earlier the versatile and extremely influential Polke had also trained from 1961 to 1967.

Barbara Nicholls presents a more process-led approach to watercolour. She studied at Goldsmiths College, University of London for a BA Fine Art between 1982 and 1986, which is when several of the YBA artists following similar lines of enquiry were also there, studying Fine Art - fellow expert pourer/handler of paint Ian Davenport being just one. I know because I was studying Fine Art at Goldsmiths at the same time. As far as I know our paths never crossed, however, I'd like to declare here and now, I'm a fan! These large paintings are a beautiful expression of the medium. Nicholls uses a variety of brushes and pouring paint to create the image by alternating flooding, blotting, and pooling of watercolour to create her forms. These, while abstract in nature, have the advantage that the wetting and drying out of water born pigment on paper settle into soft forms that remind us of CAT scans of internal organs or algae blooming under a microscope. She nudges each initial shape into how she wants the final image to materialise, by altering the method of getting paint onto the surface, changing the quality of the sheet, changing type of pigment, altering the ambient room temperature and drawing out the spectral potential of the mineral composition of the paint. She presents the five works shown here unglazed and frame free. A heart-stopping decision in terms of conservation given their vulnerability, but worth it for the impact. They are a feast for the senses.

Melanie Russell trained at University of fine Art Institute in Cardiff, and at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Russell’s work celebrate organic and natural forms which mainly come from her garden, created from seed and cuttings. Her colour palette is vibrant although again, led by nature and the often surprisingly rich hues and subtle pastel colours, reminiscent of stained glass windows. These modest works are monuments to her sense of wonderment of the natural world.

Mark Stewart is a British landscape painter who is exhibiting a series of small, framed coastal studies done rapidly in a loose style so that all his workings can be appreciated. They are charming in their quick, easy style. There is lots of white paper glinting through from under thin, transparent quickly applied paint. They are atypical of a British watercolorist, lacking in descriptive detail and although unadorned and the thoroughly honest application of the paint looks simple to do... it isn't. Each little painting is a perfect summation of an identifiable part of the British landscape.

Charlotte Verity is a British artist, trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, London and apart from her early years spent in Germany where she was born, has lived in the UK. Her work is among the most intimate and quiet of the eight artists included. Through her small-scale studies of plants and flowers Verity has made a point of studying nature. More recently she has done this through the garden she has planted and tended herself at her home in Somerset. She is married to Sir Christopher Le Brun.

James Faure Walker is a British painter and digital pioneer who has pursued computer imaging in his painting for decades. He seems to use watercolour to re-connect with the painted surface and is unusual as an artist as he is equally at home in the writing about art as well as making it. James was one of the founders of the art magazine Artscribe. His watercolours provide a kind of temporal bridge, back to earlier use of the medium by modern masters. Among them American abstract expressionist luminaries like Hans Hofmann (1880 - 1966), Willam de Kooning (1904 - 1997) and Sam Francis (1923 - 1994), who are clear influences. His work is a reminder, if it were needed, that artists have always tended to be at the cutting edge of whatever new technology is coming that is predicted, to end artistic activity as we know it.

Watercolour Now is not intended to be a definitive survey of the medium and there is no attempt to plot a single artist's work against a sub-category. The exhibition does make a coherent case for eight artists who use watercolour's strengths to their creative advantage. The informed visitor gets an abridged set of reference points for leading exponents of the medium. The clear message is...get your paint pots out and have a go!

About the author

Paul Barratt

Paul Barratt started working in contemporary art galleries in 1989, having graduated in Fine Art from Goldmsith’s, London University. He initially worked at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, one of the contemporary art dealers, who dominated the London art market in the 80s and 90s. He was approached by the Lisson Gallery to be gallery manager for the influential art dealer Nicholas Logsdail. This was followed by a short period in New York at Gladstone Gallery, to work for visionary art dealer Barbara Gladstone, working with the artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney.

 

On his return to London, Paul secured a place on the postgraduate curatorial course at the Royal College of Art, to complete an MA. After graduation in 2001, he worked as an independent curator on several projects in Oslo, London, Brighton and Basel, before joining Paul Vater at his design agency Sugarfree in 2004. He has worked with Paul ever since.

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