heather@heatherhacking.com

What is wonderful about watercolour is - you can paint half way up a windy mountain, or catch a storm coming in off the sea…you can sketch in watercolour, quickly and catch a moment of atmosphere and return home with the painting intact: with oils there is always the problem of the wet canvas sticking to yourself and everything else.

However, watercolour is very versatile and you can make a beautiful, quite detailed, painting of a still-life in your studio. I am happy to not be a 'modernist' in these days of well-publicised modern art. I enjoy capturing the blue bloom on a bowl of figs or plums in a medium in which is actually quite tricky to do. This feels like an achievement, especially if the fruit then does look fresh and delicious in a china bowl or on a handmade lace cloth, perhaps in dappled sunshine, evoking a summer picnic. I work in oils too, again in a traditional or impressionistic way: the result is equally evocative but very different.

Lace is one of my specialities: in watercolour it is a challenge because you don't use white paint, just the white of the paper which means you have to use dozens of separate tonal values: shades of white to create the shadows and folds and a contrast that highlights the actual white white sections. To test these possibilities, I made a large (lifesize) painting of an Edwardian christening robe. This beautifully intricate white cotton dress, the one in which my father and generations of babies were christened, has dozens of tucks and folds and is edged with lace, frills and embroidery. It is set against and amongst some delicate antique cream lace. This may sound as though the result would be 'twee' and very feminine, but its monumental size (for watercolour) prevents that.

By contrast, the View of Mont Blanc was painted mostly by my fingers as the brush kept freezing on to the paper.

The The Road to Geneva escaped such a 'hands-on' technique as it was painted just before that winter's snow storm.

Small paintings of Edgehill at Dawn are almost abstract in being just layers of misty landscape: as explained, these contrast with Damsons in a Chinese Bowl and Tulips and Lychees where the subject, and the white lace, are sharply delineated.

The gouache paintings, such as Blossom Trees in Richmond Park and Michelle's Garden are a response to capturing the white on white, pink on pink, effects of the sumptuousness of spring blossom that watercolour struggles to capture…and moves toward the impressionistic effects of oils as in Kentucky Spring Rainstorm.

Here are some contrasting pictures:-

Greengages in a Blue and White Dish : Watercolour: Framed

Richmond Park in Snow: Watercolour: Framed

Lilies in a Glass Vase : Oil on wood panel: 59 x 85 Unframed

Autumn Morning, Warwickshire: Watercolour: Unframed

Farm Buildings, Millac, Lot et Garonne : Watercolour Unframed

Asparagus on Madeira Lace : Watercolour Unframed

St. Matthias Church from Richmond Park: Watercolour: Framed

Geraniums in Terracotta Pots: Watercolour Framed

Michelle's Garden : Watercolour Unframed

Antique Net and silk christening Robe: Watercolour Unframed

The Thames from Putney : small version