This may look like a traditionally conceived watercolour, and it does indeed have many of the qualities of one. The subject’s pretty traditional, too: a southern European landscape in a heat haze. What’s more, the painting was based on drawings and a study done on the spot. Yet, unlike a conventional watercolourist, David Gluck prefers not to plan each painting in advance, carefully working out each move in his head because, with watercolour, backtracking is difficult, if not impossible. Gluck’s method is quite different. Rather than think ahead, he likes to respond to an image that’s evolving as he works. “I begin simply by making marks. So, halfway through, the picture might not look anything like the intended subject, and the colours can seem quite bizarre. Then, as I apply layer after layer, responding to a developing image, they come increasingly to resemble what it is that I’m looking at and ultimately depicting.” This approach is partly the result of Gluck’s interest in Alexander Cozens’s method involving random blot images, which the latter publicised in the 18th century. But if accident plays an important part in the process, how can the painting have anything to do with a real, existing motif? This picture certainly has to do with a specific location. “I know this Italian village well. I spent a month or more there for about 10 years running, painting every day. I wanted the picture to convey a strong sense of the place and atmosphere. But the painting was made in the way I’ve described, and I believe that this way of working gives a unique quality to the watercolour.” The painting was started on the spot, then continued for a few hours every day, so as to be able to work with similar light conditions. Then it was finished off in the studio. “The aim was to maintain the vigour and excitement of those first sessions throughout.” Gluck’s unconventional methods have to do with the fact that he trained as a printmaker and taught printmaking at the Central School of Art for years. But he began to draw more intensively again, and to paint seriously in watercolours. (He’s not an artist for whom watercolour is an adjunct to oils.) “I remember when I started. In about 1975, we were moving from one house to another in south London and I decided to paint the old place, so I did a watercolour of it. That got me going. So I’ve been painting more or less like this for some 30 years.” Gluck has concentrated on watercolours (and drawing and etching) ever since. For two decades, he’s been a member of the Royal Watercolour Society and has been the vice president of the RWS, too. So it must have been simply an oversight of the judges that Gluck hadn’t won a prize in the competition before. He’s sent in enough work, heaven knows — almost every year, with one or two exceptions. Mind you, it must be some compensation that the first prize he’s been awarded is a first.
Sue Rubira
Geoff
Second prize: £7,000
It’s always a pleasure to award a prize to an artist who’s not won anything in this competition before, and the pleasure’s all the greater when the painting fails just by a whisker to come out on top. Sue Rubira, who lives in Southampton, can do with the money, too, “though I don’t worry too much about it”. Trained as an illustrator at Bristol and the Royal College of Art, she lives by teaching and painting, but lacks a regular dealer and doesn’t exhibit often, somehow managing to continue her artistic career while looking after a family. Some years ago, she entered this competition with just one painting.
Though it was accepted for the exhibition, she hasn’t participated again until now. In the meantime, her preferred subject matter has changed quite radically. That earlier painting was of a fish market, but she now “concentrates on portraits pretty exclusively”. She prefers to choose her sitters herself: “I need to paint people who interest me in some way, otherwise it’s difficult to begin to understand them. This one’s of my brother, Geoff. I obviously know him very well and that helps with the painting no end.” The painting is large — 72cm wide x 91cm high. “I prefer to paint on a large scale, larger than life, and I like using very large brushes.” Nevertheless, the detail is closely observed, and the painting is obviously the result of intense concentration.
The judges admired this, as well as the overall coherence of the image — the detail never detracts from the whole. The judges were also impressed by the almost hypnotic presence of the face, which seems to be close up to us, insistent. This is partly the result of the way the edges of the head are cut by the edges of the paper. “I had a lovely piece of paper that I’d had for 25 years, waiting for the right subject, too good to waste on just anything. The surface reminded me a bit of my brother’s wrinkly skin, so it was perfect for this portrait.”
Antonia Black
Pierre Bonnard 1889
Runner-up: £2,000
You can guess what kind of person Antonia Black is from the sort of pictures she paints. They blaze with colour and energy. Followers of this competition will already know her vivid, dynamic work, chiefly landscapes of places everywhere from Provence to her native Australia. She has already won three prizes, one a second. If you saw any of those pictures, you’ll notice that this year’s winner signals a new direction, though the style’s still unmistakably hers. She once “combined brilliant and non-naturalistic colours with vigorous expressive brushwork”. Now the brushwork is more disciplined. The colour remains as vibrant, it’s applied deliberately in tiny dots, juxtaposed to give the combinations oomph and make the painting seem to glow from within. “Applying small dots, each in a separate colour, is time-consuming. Each picture takes no less than five weeks.” Not only the method has changed. She’s now concentrating on portraits not of living sitters, but of dead artists such as Bonnard. Another in the series, of the fauves Matisse and Marquet, is in our exhibition, and yet another, of Cézanne, is under way. They’re all based on small black-and-white photographs reproduced in catalogues. Bonnard was based on two snaps of the artist towards the beginning of his career. “I used Bonnard-like colours, chiefly yellows and blues, a characteristic combination.” Black came to Britain in the early 1960s to study at the Slade. Since 1966, she has been teaching art, now in Gloucester and Yorkshire. She paints exclusively in watercolour.
Graham Sendall
The Big Tree
Runner-up: £2,000
Graham Sendall is yet another of this year’s prizewinners to win an award for the first time — and at only his second attempt. His entry last year was his first, and he was quite surprised when it was accepted for exhibition: “I’ve only been painting seriously for five years, though I did work as a graphic designer.” After studying at West Sussex College of Art in the mid-1960s, he worked as creative director of Kent & Sendall Design Associates, specialising in layout and illustration. Then disillusionment with the business and the desire to paint persuaded him to retire early four years ago. He now paints full time from his home studio, exhibiting locally and selling almost everything he does.
“In fact, I’ve got nothing else to exhibit at the moment. It’s surprising, since it was only four or so years ago that I discovered the kind of picture I wanted to paint.” The dense and intensely worked style that he has developed using acrylics has its origins in a mural he did at home with little sample pots of emulsion paint, “masking out everything but one small area at a time, then building that up by stippling with the brush”. The subject of the mural was very different from that in this picture: “I live not far from Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s house, so I did a sort of Indian theme in a room furnished with Indian chairs and things.” What struck the judges about this prizewinning painting was the nostalgia it sharply evokes. It looks like a view of part of an English village, so perfect that it surely can’t exist. “But it does, and it’s close to my home here, near Pevensey. Of course, I tweaked it a bit. The tree’s not as close to the house as it seems, but I didn’t imagine the topiary. I suppose I’m celebrating the tree’s heroic scale and the endeavour that has kept it in shape over many years.” The painting certainly makes the ordinary seem extraordinary. Sendall wants to depict remarkable aspects of the Sussex landscape. “I see myself as much as a recorder as an artist,” he says, though there’s a touch of the dramatist, too. You almost expect a bobby on a bicycle or the vicar to appear, wandering in from stage left.
David Firmstone
Beautiful Dawn
Runner-up: £2,000
Given David Firmstone’s track record as an artist, it’s surprising that this is the first time he’s ever won a prize in this competition. Firmstone is vice president of the Royal Watercolour Society, was a senior art adviser for Cheshire for 23 years, has lectured in art education nationally and internationally, and has an MBE. He has entered the competition and had work accepted on several occasions before now, and Singer & Friedlander privately bought one of his paintings from the exhibition two years ago. Now, finally, he’s a prizewinner. His atmospheric watercolour is of a windswept beach on the Isle of Wight, where he lives. “Like St Ives, the light’s really fantastic here, a result, I suppose, of there being so much light-reflecting sea all around us. Turner painted here; so did John Piper.” Firmstone’s paintings are the result of an unusual technique. To begin with, he uses heavy paper, to which he applies a gesso ground, to make it rigid. Then he’ll often pour paint directly onto the paper, allowing it to run across the surface as he turns and tilts the paper. Then he “draws into the pour”, as he puts it, adding: “I love the illusion of movement that the mark of water makes.” The paper changes position throughout, beginning on the floor, then becoming increasingly vertical. This makes it sound as though the subject of each painting is almost accidentally arrived at, but this isn’t the case. The process starts in front of the motif, albeit “in an abstract manner”, and it ends in the studio, where he works on two or three paintings at a time.
Alan Gouk
Ulysses Series: Aeolus IV
Runner-up: £2,000
Alan Gouk confesses: “I’m not really a watercolourist at all. Almost all my paintings are oils, and they’re pretty big, sometimes as much as 16 feet long. But every two years or so, I work on paper for a bit, making gouaches in batches of 20 or 30. Until about 1998, I didn’t work on paper at all, but then I discovered there was quite a lot gouache could do — I particularly like the strength of colour that body colour can give you. I had a gouache framed up ready, and that was the one I sent off for this competition.” Another confession: “It’s the first time I’ve entered. To be honest, I’d never heard of this competition before.”
So, Alan Gouk is yet another of this year’s first-time prizewinners. The title of his vigorous abstract is intriguing. “For the past six years, the titles of all my paintings have been keyed to chapters in Joyce’s Ulysses, though I’ve taken as many liberties with Joyce as Joyce took with Homer. Aeolus gave his name to the Aeolian harp, which sounds when the wind strikes it. Joyce applies the name to allude to windy and pretentious journalists. I’m simply suggesting music here in the combination of forms, not just of the harp, but of the grand piano.”
This year’s judges were: Brian Allen, director of studies at the Paul Mellon Centre; Carol Robertson, last year’s winner; Stephen Goddard, painter; Trevor Frankland, past president of the Royal Watercolour Society; Joanna Selborne, curator of prints and drawings at the Courtauld; Ármann Thorvaldsson, CEO of Singer & Friedlander; and myself. The exhibition will be at the Mall Galleries, London SW1, Sept 13-23, and will then tour. For information, contact Parker Harris: 01372 462190, www.parkerharris.co.uk .
