Watercolours

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I have painted with watercolours since I was a child. My mother liked to paint and draw and I followed her interest. I would have my paint box and paper along on our holidays in the South of Devon, where I painted the cliffs and sea in the late 1950’s

The activity dropped away when I attended art school and did not return until the 1980’s. On vacations with young children, wanting to create during stays at Grandma's house on Bazan Bay on Vancouver Island, I returned to watercolour seascapes. Since then I have periodically made groups of work while travelling to England, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

I paint small sketches and various sizes up to full sheet works 22 x 30 inches which are museum matted and framed. I work on French Archers, and Italian Fabriano 100% cotton rag paper, with Windsor and Newton Artists Watercolour Pigments. I have also made a number of pen and ink drawings and prints.

I taught a class in Watercolour for the University of Alberta in 2006/7 and 2008 in Vico Equense, in Southern Italy and figurative work was always part of my instructional spectrum in the 42 years I taught painting and drawing as a professor at the U of A. So in that way I have been continually involved in looking at and considering representational work.

Watercolour painting for me remains a vocation which, when I embrace it from time to time, I do so with the same degree of involvement as I do in my ‘abstract’ paintings. Responding directly to a motif of nature before me, or from that that I have experienced, as an inspirational source, both stimulate me to respond creatively. I am a naturalist, I am stimulated by the behavior of ‘matter’, be it a landscape or the topographic landscapes I create in pouring paint in my abstract painting process. They both involve the same painting principles. See my Thoughts on Painting.

I greatly admire the watercolors paintings of the English watercolour school, especially John Constable’s skies and J.M.Turner’s atmospheric land and seascapes.