Valentine Cascarino Iboh
ART
Painting in watercolour is frowned upon – the victim of a disturbing myth, mostly harboured by critical modernists who believed watercolour is Victorian and amateurish.
Those critics don’t even consider the fact that painting in watercolour presents a direct link to the development of romantic painting in the 19th century. Neither do they take cognisance of the fact that the great English masters William Blake and JMW Turner both exploited the virtues of this medium of painting to their fullest.
These critics look down on the watercolour medium since, over the centuries, it has become such a significant part of mainstream art.
Almost in an endeavour to assert what’s positive about their chosen form, the Watercolour Society of South Africa kickstarted the so-called Standard Bank Watercolour Festival this year in the hope of retrieving the reputation of a type of art many art-lovers think can only be found once a month at Zoo Lake at Artists Under the Sun.
The group hopes to celebrate the high points of watercolour throughout the centuries. The festival will be taking place at various art institutions as well as known galleries throughout this year.
For a start, a single comprehensive exhibition featuring the works of more than 15 watercolour artists dating back to the 17th century has, for the past month, been on display at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.
The exhibition, entitled Stained Paper: South African Images in Watercolour, focuses on a variety of visual narratives and histories of watercolour in Southern Africa over the past three hundred years.
Most of the paintings were drawn from various art museums, cultural history institutions, libraries and archives, making the exhibition a landmark event showcasing some of the country’s historical riches.
The thematic diversity of the paintings ranges from the period of colonial conquest and early settler images of plant and animal to contemporary exponents. The exhibition has also included the geology of Southern Africa, its inhabitants and their material culture. Highlighting the exotic, the early paintings have been done by botanists,zoologists,geologists,
missionaries and ethnographers.
According to Karin Skawran, one of the exhibition’s curators, watercolour is one of the most widely used media internationally, but despite its prominence it has not recieved much attention outside amateur art circles.
Skawran says: “We elected to limit the selection of works to the watercolour holding of our national, civic and academic public collections, which contains a wealth of watercolour paintings that have rarely had public exposure.”
The exhibition carries the works of 18th and 19th century artists like Francois le Vaillant, Thomas Baines, Charles Bell, Thomas Bowler, Samuel Daniell, George Angas and Frederick l’Ons.
Later exponents of the form included South African artists across forms and cultural spectrums – names like Wolf Kibel, David Mogano, Gerard Benghu, Gladys Mgudlandlu, Ernest Mancoba, David Kolane and Durant Sihlali.
In order to balance the exhibition’s content, the curators “decided to make every effort to locate early images by black artists whose work had for a long time been marginalised,” Skawran says.
“Several of them had never been seen by the public. Most of the artists in the exhibition have at one time or another, and with a great or lesser degree of success, made use of watercolour or other water- based media, such as gouache, in their paintings.”
Works from the exhibition Stained Paper can be seen in the Grahamstown Gallery at the Albany Museum during the National Arts Festival from June 30 to July 8