Still on the theme of the watercolour exhibition at Tate Britain -- I wish, wish, wish that I could paint - another thing which fascinated me were two small pictures by Turner: Scarlet Sunset (1830) and Shields Lighthouse (1826). Under each one someone had done a rough copy, trying to show the effects of the use of gouache, a kind of paint which consists of pigment suspended in water, demonstrating how it made the light more, or less dense.
Admittedly, the copies had been dashed off in order to make a point, but the difference between them and the originals was striking. The copies looked like paint on paper, pretty paint on fine paper, but nothing more than that. Turner's watercolour looked like a sunset: gazing at it, I could almost feel the last traces of the day's warmth on my skin, hear the birdsong etc
Turner's painting had a kind of visionary quality that I suspect belongs exclusively to genius and can't be worked up by a hopeful learner, but in addition to that it had extraordinary clarity and definition, which leads me on to the moral of today's little story.
Even if your vision isn't as epic as Turner's, it is certainly within your power to convey it with clarity. This means deciding what you want to say and saying it as economically as possible. It means being incredibly judicious with your use of detail, a vital ingredient that can obscure as much as it reveals. To sharpen your skills a little, why not try describing the room that you are in, or the view that you are looking at, with as much detail as possible (the grit in the herringbone pattern on the path, the half-fledged forsythia) and then take fifty percent of the detail out. This will sharpen your observational skills, help to give clarity to what you are describing, and give you some practice in making difficult editorial decisions, like what to keep and what to chuck. In the spirit of Turner, you could even describe a sunset....
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