The Bluebird Card Co

The Bluebird Card Co

Geronimo!

Watercolours > the combination of pigment, paper & water may be the perfect way to tell the tales of the landscape

A watercolour painting borrows all its components from the landscape itself - water, pigment & cotten for the paper & many of these pigments are simply earth itself 

Water came into existence during the early formation of the Solar System some 4.5 billion years ago. In other words, it is older than the earth itself

Very little water has ever escaped the earths' atmosphere and no new water has ever been made


The water, mixed with pigment, that represents the landscape in a watercolour painting has been co-existing with all the other water in the landscape itself for billions of years

So, perhaps not surprisingly, the medium - watercolour - is intriguingly placed to represent & re-present the landscape we experience when we take a stroll in the hills or mooch around lichen adorned gravestones in a churchyard

When painting, it's exciting to watch the pigments flow and interact in water > and if it goes well, it may look like a cloud rolling over an escarpment in real life, or water flowing in a stream. A microcosm. A miniature earth on a piece of cotton paper

It works. 

A watercolour painting suggests a feeling rather than offering a description. It conjours up emotions rather than telling us what things look like. At its best, it's a shortcut to the land itself

At its best it can glow like stained glass, as the transparency of pigment + water allows the luminescence of near pure paper white to appear to light the colours from within & I sometimes like to imagine, when looking at a evocative and eloquent piece of work, that it's possible to feel the same sense of wonder that a medieval visitor to a medieval cathedral may have felt when looking toward a multicoloured rose window - Aah, I imagine they may have mused, so that's what the world really looks like




I also sometimes wonder if some of the maybe limitations imposed by the medium itself add their own magic to the mix. Simplification. Paring the landscape down to the bone, to its essential elements maybe helps to explain the connection we feel, via the painting, to the landscape itself

Maybe the beauty of the earth can be all a bit much to take in, in one go, in real life. Just too much information. The watercolor, along with the necessary simplification - no one tries to paint every leaf on a tree- makes it easier for us to experience the experience of a landscape in a 'less is more' sort of way

In any case, the paintings reproduced here are based on the sort of feelings I have after 5 years or so living up in the hills in the Black Mountains in Wales, after a bit of simplification, along with an amount of emotional distillation

Available as greetings cards > well, nearly! Wish me luck now and please check back for updates