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Statement
'I trained at the Slade as an oil painter and gravitated to the life rooms there – mainly because it was the quietest place to work. Actually I only ever painted one nude – I was more a painter of still-life and figure compositions really, but I learnt a good deal about colour while I was there. There was some good rigorous teaching and I learned how to improve my drawing … and more than anything how to look – above all how to look at colour and tone. I continued to paint mainly in oils for about ten years, a lot of still life and later landscape when I was living in rural North Essex. Initially I found watercolour a very difficult medium tonally, but I persisted with it and gradually my painting developed in that direction.
To begin with it was also partly expedience, I suppose, because watercolours, when they work, are quicker to produce, and it seemed a lot easier to move works on paper around, especially abroad. I was having quite a few exhibitions in America and Australia at the time. But also, thinking back, I can't say I ever really liked painting on canvas that much, I've never really liked the give of canvas or the tooth ... I tended to prime it out. And as an oil painter I painted with translucent glazes quite a bit, working from light to dark. So watercolour was a natural shift in a way … Funnily enough, watercolour painters have sometimes remarked on how I use all the opaque pigments in watercolour ... cerulean blue, cobalt violet ... I suppose that's what happens when you start out as an oil painter.
But most of all, what I love about watercolour is the wonderful surface that results from layers of translucent pigment over white paper, particularly if the pigment is granulating or doing something interesting. I also like the way that the brush stroke doesn't intervene too much. In watercolour you're just as likely to end up with a stain or a blot, which is nice. Brush marks tend to dominate in oil painting, I used to spend a lot of time worrying about them, or moving them about or changing them. Watercolour liberates you from that. I’ve come to enjoy that slightly edgy tension that comes with making a watercolour – you never know whether a painting is going to end up in the bin, almost until the end. There’s always the possibility of making an error that can’t be corrected or of over-doing something. And yet some of the best and freest passages result from desperation – when you think you’ve ruined a painting and so you think "to hell with it". So there’s almost a sense of alchemy when a watercolour painting succeeds.’
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