56cm x 76cm, 300gsm Lanaquarelle cold-pressed paper
Winner of the 1996 Paul Schwartz Memorial Award,
American Watercolor Society, New York
I decided to show this transparent full-sheet watercolor here on my blog for several reasons.
1) It seemed to resonate with the spirit of LVB9 (see artwork several posts below)
2) Every so often artists produce works they almost "recognise", like a kind of déjà vu, but not exactly so. This happened for me in the above watercolor.
3) Imo there seems to have entered into the blogosphere a notion that 'new is better' and that we must be seen to be constantly updating and 'moving forward'. This can conceivably create all sorts of anxieties be they large or small.
In this watercolor, painted directly and interactively to wet paper without preliminary drawing, I imagined the storm as somehow providing the very rescue needed, the emblematic lifeboat, in a palmar upward thrust of sea amongst the surrounding turbulence. [Figures in this painting would have been superfluous and would have detracted from the symbolism of the lifeboat. The rescued figures are emblematically inferred.]
The Lifeboat, to me, resounds with Beethoven's 9th. But here I've decided to relate the
Lifeboat painting to an entirely different kind of music (see YouTube vid immediately below): a song by the Australian band
The Black Sorrows, "Hold on to Me". The lyric connects all:
The rescued, ..rescuing. No room on the lifeboat, you can hold on to me.
