In October 2024 three fellow Royal Watercolour Society members and myself are haD a group exhibition at the RWS Gallery in Whitcomb Street, London.
Common Ground on the RWS website
My Common Ground artworks can be seen here
The world about me frames and informs my visual language. From landscape to the magical patterns of indigenous Art. Then in the quiet of my studio, I seek to create something new from my swag bag of stimuli, themes and ideas. To this end I use whatever medium or material suits my purpose.
The sea in all its iterations has obsessed me since childhood. The North sea in particular is ‘my’ sea. I observe the passage of the tankers along the horizon, the windfarms, the subtle changes of light and tidal movement; I also imagine what lies beneath. For with increasing coastal erosion and whole communities lost to the sea, a recent source of fascination is Doggerland; the land bridge that connected the island of Britain to Northern Europe more than 10,000 years ago but which I can only explore—and exploit—imaginatively. Here traces of that past era are gradually being recorded yielding imprints of auroch, forests and mesalithic human activity as well as thousands of wrecks that themselves represent human evolution.
Over the years The Shipping Forecast and nautical charts have long given me the material to create imagery that is both representational and symbolic.
I am a landscape painter, and my work is about the spirit of place. I travel the world – and probably as a result of my peripatetic upbringing – I am a restless vagabond. But my work is made in my two studios, one in rural France and one in central London. I work from memory, and from small studies in watercolour that I make from direct observation of nature. My painting is grounded in the very real experience of being in a particular place at a particular time, in a particular season and in a particular light. I like weather. All weather. I also like walking and painting in the mountains, and in this show I’ve included paintings that came to life in many different countries. Since the pandemic I am back on the road. I’ve included paintings of the Massif Central near to where I live in France, the Spanish Pyrenees over the border, the Italian Dolomites and more recently, the Cordillera de Talamanca in Costa Rica and the Sierra Madre del Sud in Mexico.
Titles are very important.
In recent years I have evolved a method of creating shards of painted paper that echo the texture, mineralogy and geology of the land. In the land is its story. The paintings are not collages in the pure sense of the concept, although they are pieced together rather like the Amish patchwork quilts from my Pennsylvania childhood that I sleep under every night in both my homes. I sometimes think all my paintings are one big painting that has subdivided like cells. One painting certainly leads into another and I often work on several at a time.
Frances Hatch
A Fenland childhood shaped the fundamentals of my practice. An introduction to the tradition of plein air painting was via a tin of watercolours unearthed from the cupboard-under-the-stairs whilst at primary school. The pans were reluctant to yield their pigment, yet they offered a means to respond to experiences that were marvellous to me in my solitary meanderings in the flat black land beyond the village of Littleport in the Isle of Ely. Mundane miracles like Jack Frost turning up in wet paint continue to stop me in my tracks- quite literally. I still make my work outside with all its attendant unpredictability and discomfort. Paintings are woven out of material expressions indigenous to each site (geology, weather, season, tide). These place-gatherings are integrated with gouache, acrylic, or watercolour to build what I like to think of as containers of particular experience.
I am cultivating a long-held awareness of relatedness within an animate earth. My way of being with the land is multi-sensory and whole-bodied. Hands-on and messy. Inside Nature’s connective tissues there is much to grieve and much to celebrate. I remain child in my wide-eyed making– a praise poet at heart. Praise as activism.
My current studio base sits on another marginal place of strong character: The Isle of Portland in Dorset. This exhibition includes collections made along The Jurassic Coast in Dorset, Cumbria, Wales and Devon.
Linda Saul
I am influenced by the landscape and how it changes over time – whether fleeting or the slow process of weathering and decay and the interaction of nature with the man-made. In recent years I have spent extended periods in Iceland which I find endlessly inspirational and is the source for much of the work in this show.
Though captivated by watercolour I use it in a non-traditional way. My working process harnesses randomness and chance. I have innovated techniques to produce exciting textural effects using different and sometimes modified paper surfaces and exploiting the differing physical properties of watercolour and acrylic. These are utilised in my work through collage. There is a constant interchange between control and chaos as the work is built up in layers until a satisfactory endpoint is reached.
