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- 29 April
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Valerie Tring : Anxious Watercolours
I am in possession of a large ( 22 colour pan) black metal ‘Made
in England’ Winsor & Newton watercolour paintbox.
For several years now I have been obsessed with the medium of
watercolour. The place of watercolours as paintings rather than
drawings on paper – as finished and autonomous (‘Projective’
as described by Bois). This is not unrelated to the story of
exhibition watercolours and the societies that promoted them
alongside oil paintings. Watercolour’s peculiar qualities
of transparency and portability made it the medium for recording
the origins of flora and fauns; architecture and its ruins;
landscapes and the weather. The shape of colour in water…sometimes
fugitive pigments “ colours…held on the paper by a
feeble binding of gum” (Thackeray). What began with ‘stained
drawing methods’ (tinting- imitating tone in oils), opened
out into pure washes of colour (British artists working in Italy
@1780)
My own watercolour fetish began with the mysterious and delicate
watercolours of jellyfish on vellum, and others kangaroos and
possums by Charles Alexandre Lesueur in the 1999 Museum of Sydney
exhibition ‘Terre Napoleon: Australia through French Eyes
1800-1804’ curated by Susan Hunt and Paul Carter. On display
were wonderful watercolours by Lesueur & Petit unofficial
artists for Nicholas Baudin’s exploration of Australia
on the floating laboratories, the Geographie & the Naturaliste.
Thereafter I began experimenting with watercolours on leather
especially soft kangaroo skin- my local suppliers are two elderly
Polish leather merchants and boot makers who are known for designing
the best riding boots in Sydney including polo boots for the
late Kerry Packer.
Anxiety is the subject and rhetoric of my watercolours –
whether baby animals- brightly coloured - fragile and pensive
-‘Others’ (2002-2004); or kangaroos and boys- play-fighting,
‘Anxious emblems’ (2005-2007) ; and Antipodean landscape
ruins –of houses after bushfires, cyclones or floods- ‘Ruinscapes’
(2002+) . I first exhibited the ‘Ruinscapes’ in a
touring exhibition ‘Academici: Australia Council VACB Rome
Studio residency 1999-2004’ in May 2005 just months after
the nightmare of the Tsunami in the Pacific Ocean. In recent
years research on the physical science of climate change has
been prepared and reported on with growing urgency, projecting
extremes and intensities of heatwaves and cyclones.
One of Durer’s most unusual watercolours is ‘Vision
of a Cloudburst’, 1525 painted by the artist after a disturbing
dream of a deluge…when he tried to describe how the water
struck the ground at a distance with such force it could be
heard as a frightening roar. A wonderous watercolour, but anxious.
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