The painters pushing the boundaries of watercolours
“I enjoy the spontaneity and unpredictability of watercolour. You have to control it, but it also has a life of its own”
Angus Mcewan layers his paintings to extraordinary effect while Jenny Matthews goes to the edge of losing the work in her quest for the look she wants. Both artists talk to Susan Mansfield about their style and approach ahead of a joint exhibition opening this weekend
When Angus Mcewan saw the two old boats hauled up on the beach, half-submerged by sand, he knew he had the makings of a painting. He just needed some time.
Mcewan, who lives in Fife, was in Qingdao, China, as part of a delegation of artists taking part in an exhibition. They were about to have lunch in a beachfront restaurant to mark their last day in the area.
“After lunch, I asked if we could go out and do some drawing. I was engrossed in sketching the boats when I looked up and suddenly realised there was no one else on the beach. Then I spotted the bus that we’d come in, slowly coming towards me, and I realised that everyone was actually leaving.” He grins. “I think they were going to stop – they were just giving me a subtle hint.”
Those hasty sketches formed the basis of a painting, ‘The Shroud of Qingdao’, which took several months to complete. It has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles and Barcelona, picking up awards along the way, and is now in the Smithy Gallery, Blanefield, where Mcewan is having a rare Scottish exhibition with fellow artist Jenny Matthews.
Mcewan and Matthews are among the top artists in Scotland working in watercolour, a sometimes maligned medium, having been associated with insipid Victorian ladies, and the zealous amateurs found on Watercolour Challenge. But, in their hands, it becomes vivid, fresh and contemporary.
The exhibition in Blanefield, north of Glasgow, is the primary opportunity to see the work of both artists in Scotland this year. Both exhibit their work internationally and Mcewan, in particular, shows more often abroad than at home. He currently has work in exhibitions in Bulgaria and Shanghai, and talks about future projects in Taiwan, Morocco, Russia and Australia. Both artists have won prizes in the ‘Marche d’acqua’, the prestigious watercolour competition based in the Italian town of Fabriano, famous for the making of watercolour paper, and take it in turns to lead a Scottish delegation there for the annual watercolour festival.
“I work quite slowly, so I have to choose where to show my work,” Mcewan says. “These days I don’t show very often in the UK, I concentrate on getting the work into an international arena.” It means he often finds inspiration for his paintings abroad too, as he did in Qingdao. He’s drawn to places and objects that hold traces of human presence, but are ageing, decaying, abandoned: rusty machinery, peeling paint, the view through the window of an empty house, a tumbledown chicken coop, two old boats on a beach.
“These are the things that interest me the most, things that suggest times past. You actually don’t see an awful lot of that in Scotland, we like to fix everything and clean everything and paint it all up. In places like Malta or Italy, they just allow the character of things to emerge.”
Having trained as a painter in oils and acrylics at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee, he was switched on to the possibilities of watercolour while on a travelling scholarship to China shortly after leaving college. “I took watercolours with me because I thought they would be more portable, but I was struggling with it. I was in a hotel room in Xi’an working on a painting and it just wasn’t working at all,” he remembers.
“Part of the scholarship was to have a show at the RSA when I got back, and I didn’t have much time. I got so frustrated with it, I took white gouache and covered the whole of the painting. And as I was pacing around the room in a bad mood, the image started to come through again as the gouache dried, and I thought, ‘That’s really interesting’. That was the breakthrough moment for me when I realised I can do an awful lot with this.”
He quickly developed his own techniques, achieving colours and textures some would contend are close to impossible with watercolour. Paintings are produced using multiple layers – and a few trade secrets he prefers not to divulge – and the level of detail is eyewatering. “I’ve really pushed watercolour,” he says. “I do all kinds of things with it no one else does, I take watercolour right up to the edge. But it is an amazing medium, and it offers so much the other mediums don’t offer.
“I know people very much expect watercolour to look a certain way. I’ve even had people stand up in my demonstrations and say: ‘I thought we were looking at watercolour here’ and I say ‘It is watercolour, you can see the tubes of paint’ and they still don’t believe it. I’ve had many angry exchanges with people who think I’m doing something supernatural with the medium. I find changing people’s perceptions about watercolour quite enjoyable.”
For Jenny Matthews, who is particularly known for her colourful and sensitive depictions of flowers and plants, the moment of falling
in love with watercolour came while being taught botanical painting at Edinburgh College of Art by Dame Elizabeth Blackadder. She learned from Elizabeth how to paint expressively in watercolour using larger amounts of water, until the process becomes a kind of balancing act with pigment and paint.
“You’ve got to judge carefully how much water you need to achieve the result that you want. I actually find that quite exciting, because you’re sort of on the edge of losing the painting, there’s the potential that the whole thing’s going to go pearshaped. I enjoy the spontaneity and unpredictability of watercolour. You have to control it, but it also has a life of its own, it’s a balance between taking control and working with happy accidents. I find it quite a liberating medium.”
As a painter of flowers, she runs the risk of being pigeon-holed as a traditional watercolourist, but her paintings prove otherwise with their dense, vibrant colours and combination of large, free strokes with fine definition. She describes her work for the Smithy Gallery show as “doing what I love best – finding flowers and painting them”.
She says: “Often, when people ask what I do, I say I’m an artist and that I use watercolour and you can see them thinking ‘Oh, I know what watercolour is. It’s probably small, and if it’s flowers it’ll be maybe be a bit twee.’ People don’t imagine it to be quite strong colours, big scale, that’s not how people traditionally think of watercolours, but you can do all that. I quite enjoy surprising people.”
While her work pulls towards freedom and abstraction, Mcewan’s is characterised by control and precision. Both, however, are entirely committed to their chosen medium. Mcewan says: “We’re diverse, but using the same medium. We use it in different ways, with different methods, but there’s a cohesion. The show’s called Unity & Diversity because we’re both coming from the same school of thought.”