Watercolours

The irreversibility of painting with watercolours is always a challenge. The medium asserts its specificity by destabilising the control that the painter usually prefers. In making these Watercolours, I was attracted by the need to work from the white, the light, the plain paper surface. Making any mark—taking a decision—is final and cannot be corrected by adding opaque layers. I wanted to explore color, without any signifiers that determine meaning and push us to read rather than experience. Juxtaposing these watercolour images with another series of works, the photographic double portraits of Other People’s Feelings …, permitted me to explore how these portraits communicate at a level beyond the reading of likeness. Can the experience of empathy be transposed into a non-mimetic form, resonating rather with the « atmosphere » of the portraits? If we first tried to physically interpret the shape of a tree with our bodies, how would that influence our drawing of the tree?