'HYDRAULIC GRADIENT', 2016 Watercolour on Saunders Waterford

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Barbara Nicholls
'HYDRAULIC GRADIENT', 2016 Watercolour on Saunders Waterford
2018-20

About the Item

'HYDRAULIC GRADIENT', 2016 Watercolour on Saunders Waterford 638gsm.HP paper 220 x 152 cm Series: Signed and dated verso Signed and dated British artist Barbara Nicholls’s large scale abstract watercolour paintings have a grandeur that resides in the movement of colour across surface, traces of water and pigment as if sediment flowing through a riverbed, patterned rocks and sand laid bare by the warmth and illumination of sun and wind. Vibrant colour and organic patterns and shapes reflect the elemental movement of nature, the tones, surface, structures, and texture of the earth — rendered in a place of imagined and observed beauty. Pools of transparent expanses of pigment form circular traces, spectral imprints of the performative act of painting. The artist shares that her work begins with the experience of nature: “I spend much time in the Peak District of the English countryside and other remote landscapes. Some are semi agricultural with their straight edged fields and some just craggy rock pavements. I have worked in an ancient dried lakebed in Lake Mungo, NSW Australia and walked through glaziers in Patagonia….” Like Helen Frankenthaler, Nicholls’s practice is founded on technical experimentation in painting which in turn reflects the processes of nature: “When the watercolour pigment grains disperse on my horizontal paper they become ‘micro landscapes’ affected by wind, gravity and temperature all contrived within my studio. My sun is a heater, my wind a fan, the gravity, a giant area of warping undulating un-stretched watercolour paper.” The artist uses a system of pouring water, paint, fans and heat to create her images. Watercolour allows a translucency and illusion of depth as light and a sense of elemental movement. To begin, Nicholls applies water with a mop brush and watercolour paint is added to the wet areas. The artist will add up to ten applications of paint creating a sense of layering and geological strata, areas of the paper appearing as if illuminated light and glassy stone. This is all achieved without the use of a brush. “I encourage capillary action where water molecules are attracted to paint particles and are transported against the forces of gravity caused by the undulating paper. Surface tension creates an actual tension in me as I load more water onto the surface judging whether the pool will burst like a dam and flow down the hill of the paper or sit like a drying lake awaiting for the next rains.” Nicholls shares: “The painting process for me is similar in intensity to the experience of walking through a landscape. A similar heightened attention occurs where I observe the minutiae of things and the extent and scale of them -from observing small grains of stone with their differing colours in the sediment of a stream to seeing the colour of an entire rock face in a hill. Feeling the gravitational pull of a hill as I climb whilst imagining the weight and time involved in creating the geology of the surroundings towering above and deep beneath my feet.” In these transparent pictures of colour and watery expanses of the passage of time and elements, we are transported to a world of imagined splendor. Journeys through the natural world are evoked as an observed passage of time, of watery erosion, revealed traces of material and elemental flow. This is the unexpected vibrancy of colour found in the glacial landscape, the exquisite beauty of nature’s structures laid out in expanses of stream beds, the pools of sunlit water, the enigmatic beauty of geologic rock and ruined rivers. Abstract and powerful Nicholls’s paintings evoke the sublime. Rosa JH Berland

Creator:
Barbara Nicholls (1963, British)
Creation Year:
2018-20
Dimensions:
Height: 86.62 in (220 cm)Width: 59.85 in (152 cm)Depth: 0.08 in (2 mm)
Medium:
Watercolor,Laid Paper
Movement & Style:
Abstract
Period:
2010-
Framing:
Framing Options Available
Condition:
Gallery Location:
London, GB
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU172829549432