Watercolours

2009

7 - 14 November 2009

Launch of exhibition catalogue on Saturday 14 November at 12:00

Robert Hodgins completed this collection of watercolours over a period of almost a year, at times allowing them to develop slowly by adding layer upon layer of watercolour (up to thirty layers), letting them dry before each addition. At other times, working with 'wells' of pigment saturated water, resulting in intense colour areas causing the paper to cockle, or drawing deliberately into the painted images with watercolour pencil and graphite pencil. 

Watercolour is wet drawing. It is in its wetness that an essential sense of what it means to draw emerges:  to cause to flow; to draw water; to drain from a source. Drawing has many fluid aspects. The dipping of a brush into ink emptied from the sacs of an octopus is a centuries old occupation. Seas of pigment swimming in liquid is the essence of watercolour.

Colour pigment is added to water, not oil, as the medium, and gum arabic is used as a binder. The brilliancy of pure watercolour occurs because its translucent nature allows the white surfaces of the paper to be used as a lightening agent, even though it is coloured by the watercolour pigment.

According to Walter Benjamin, watercolour is the instance in which colour and line coincide. Pencil outlines remain visible while paint is applied fleetingly, or layer upon layer.

Watercolour is a hazardous enterprise. It behaves in an unpredictable and unrepeatable manner and as such it is an emblem of uncertainty. Brush marks can be extremely precise with an exactitude that seems to contradict the easy flow of the colour; at other times it can be an amorphous haze of seemingly randomly applied blotches of colour.

As a watercolourist, Robert Hodgins is a minimalist. His watercolours, similar to many of his paintings, are executed in fluid brush strokes, resembling visual versions of stream of consciousness. He says he makes watercolours because he thinks with them. ‘Thoughts’ pour onto the paper and flow across the picture plane as spontaneously as thinking emanates from the brain. They culminate in a calamity of seemingly clumsy bodies, all of whom exhibit a wry sense of humour and self-irony, as well as a quiet dignity.

Copyright the author