Colour and Transparency

The quality of the watercolours of Lesley Dumbrell, Robert Jacks and Victor Majzner may well come as a surprise even to admirers of their recent work. Each seems to have discovered an intensity of effect in the medium which makes these relatively modestly scaled works equal to their larger paintings on canvas. The effect is partly carried through the colour, more piquant and varied in watercolour than oil or acrylic, and partly through the personal, intimate nature of the works. Whether real or imagined, we feel closer to the sensibility of the three artists in their watercolours than their grander designs on canvas.

The medium itself encourages the artist to expose his or her handwriting. The fluidity of watercolour and the need to work with rapid fluency invite both virtuosity and decisiveness. Watercolour has to be taken as a whole, instantly, even when the compositions are intricate and elaborate as they frequently are here. The watercolourist must keep the weight of the hand even across the entire sheet to maintain unity of touch so integral to the aesthetic pleasure of the medium. In watercolour the artist works more closely to the pictorial field, never straying further than arm’s length from any part of the work. The viewer’s experience is no less intimate; delight lies in viewing the work in close-up, sensing the medium as much as seeing the image.

All this contributes to our strong sense of watercolour as an art of sensibility where thought and feeling cannot be disentangled. Yet the watercolours in this exhibition are not the hurried or deft sketches so often associated with plein air watercolour. Rather the three artists present works more akin to the ‘finished’ drawing or watercolour of the past, in which the whole of their artistic personalities are contained. All three artists are now at a stage of maturity when the full dimension of their artistic personality has emerged clearly. Each in different ways reflects on the difficult and intricate path abstraction has taken over the past ten to fifteen years. All have their roots in abstraction and have therefore developed a firm view about the aesthetic probity of each individual work which has to be good on its own terms and not for any reasons external to it. In their early work there was an exhilaration in this autonomous nature of abstraction: it freed them from prevailing aesthetic orthodoxies. Although none of them shows a dissatisfaction with these earlier premises, each reveals in different ways a search for subject matter which can be accommodated within abstraction. Their watercolours, more personal in tendency than their larger canvases, are critical encounters in this search.

Sourced from; Irena Zdanowicz & Patrick McCaughey, Colour and Transparency: The watercolours of Lesley Dumbrell, Robert Jacks, Nictor Majzner, National Gallery of Victoria, 1986, p. 6