Several days ago, in an upstairs storage area, having recently returned to making watercolours after a five, seven, perhaps even a 10-year hiatus, I pulled my old stretching board for wc paper from its position behind some old art materials and supplies.
“Bonus,” the board beamed with a near-auditory inflection, as it held an already stretched piece of first-class paper still taped into position. The ‘Arches’ stamp in the lower left corner identified it as such. And the fact that I was seeing that imprint in reverse ought to have tipped me off to the exact nature of my later discovery.
I’d already chosen my subject so without thinking twice I installed this big one-inch-thick slab of warp-resistant plywood with its stretched paper onto my easel, and at once set about to pencil in some marks that would help me lock down the landscape I hoped to render in watercolour.
For our purposes in this story we can speed-edit forward to about three days later and a successfully executed painting. New to the watercolour game again I chose to approach the image in about four well paced out stages rather than in the one all-or-nothing emotional gamble one can otherwise take with watercolours. So now it was time to untape the image, separate the finished work from the board, and view it without the messy tape at its edges. In that process the item fell to the floor and in so doing revealed its reverse side.
At a first glance, neither ‘pro’ nor ‘con’, and in some consternation at the quandary posed for display, the two sides seemed to have nothing in common. The item on the original side is radically different in technique which includes collaged segments from a separate watercolour (I do have two other previous wc works which also explore slice/rip/chop and paste) though this one adds a phrase from one of my poems.
And yet, by titling, these particular two are close Canadian kin: “Oceanside, Collins’ Cove, Burin, NL, 2017”. And “Oceanside, Peggys’ Cove Light, Peggy’s Cove, NS, circa 2007-10”.
Anyone who knows the Peggy’s Cove rocks at the light there will find an instant connection and cognition.
By extraordinary coincidence the poetry quote aptly says, “…down where the ripples of ending furl into ripples of beginning…”
I’ve decided I like both images enough to build a display frame that will exhibit both sides simultaneously.
I will also continue to sometimes include collaged compositions in some of my future watercolours. It enables such different compositions!
fillière 