Dazzling Water

5th-9th September, 2022

Gallery 8,8 Duke Street St James's, St. James's, London SW1Y 6BN

‘Usually painters paint water just as the camera captures it recording how it looks in a single fraction of a second. The image is frozen . The person looking at the pictures probably recognises the image as one of a sequence they have themselves have seen, whether a slow swirl reflected on a swimming pool bottom, or the spitting spray on the crest of a wave. Their memory fills in the blanks either side of that frozen moment.

Recently I have have been watching the sparkle on the Pang, a fast-flowing stream, as it joined the slow-moving Thames. Each time I stared long and hard at the watersmeet and tried to single  out one particular moment to record in paint but I found my eye darted about the waters surface  without stopping, distracted from one flash of the sun to another even more inviting. My eyes were led a merry dance across a myriad of attractions and my brain found it increasingly difficult to try and assimilate exactly what I was looking at.

My usual method of painting a subject is to analyse what is before me and then set about recording my findings on paper.  This time the constant change before my eyes defied analysis. Then I suddenly realised there was an alternative way to describe the subject without choosing to freeze  a particular second as would the camera.’

Instead I assembled a conglomeration of pastel strokes that suggested the rapid moves my eyes had to make when surveying various portions of the whole turmoil of movement before them. Some sections were predominantly bright and flashing, others were quieter, more slowly moving; some warmer in colour, others much cooler. 

The difficulty of choosing a suitable coloured chalk to interpret a passage was tremendous as the retina of my eye flared and recoiled from the sun bursts concentrating on where and what sort of mark I should use to represent a particular area.

I often half closed my eyes to simplify the action before them hoping to discover a repeating pattern of movement I could use to characterise various areas of the total feeling of movement that was before me. No sooner had I thought I had captured a particular characteristic of a section than it dissolved into something quite different.

I have done my best to make marks over the whole picture surface that suggest this ever-changing series of differing journeys my eyes had to make in this quest. The result is a chaos of unpredictable lines and curves of direction scattered over the whole. 

I hope the viewer who tries to sort out the chaos of brush strokes will feel much the same agitated excitement that my own eyes enjoyed searching the subject. 

So, to sum up, instead of recording a single instant, my paintings are full of inviting journeys for the viewer’s eyes to take and experience over time the pleasure of exploring the dazzle of sun on water.

Nick Schlee 2022