James Brown

“Towards the Sydney Heads”, 2022

Watercolour on heavy wove paper

Size: (sheet) 42 x 29.7 cm; (image borderline) 21 x 21 cm.

Watercolour is the perfect medium for making freely laid strokes and the most subtle of colour gradations. The only problem is when an artist has a change of mind and wants to alter or even completely erase a passage in the painting where the paint didn’t land “just right.” My solution is partly to ignore and just accept such less than successful areas, but if I have to deal with an issue, I choose a heavy/thick paper that is resilient to corrective scrubbing. Of course, too many changes of mind and scrubbing show grimly and the freshness that makes a watercolour gleam with inner light disappears.

One of my favourite “things” to do in Sydney (Australia) is to take the passenger ferry from Circular Quay (the central harbour in the city) to Manly (an outer suburb with wonderful beaches) which takes about 20 mins and passes the most beautiful of rock faces that one could wish to see. Needless to say, the rockface shown here is based on a photo I took from the Manly ferry.