Original artwork description:

Insubstantial Masonry Series
The title for this series comes from a line in the poem 'Venice' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882). Poetry inspires my paintings, as in some ways the poet is trying to do something very similar to the painter when making their art. Today the poem becomes even more apt as the masonry erodes slowly under the influence of tidal salt water. When the sea water recedes, it leaves wet bricks behind, and the salt slowly works its way up the brickwork. The salt corrodes the bricks, and eventually the bricks break down, turning to powder.
Abstractions from Venice - part of a recurring series in which I explore the greens, the insubstantiality and light qualities of Venice. Working towards abstraction gives the elements I am interested in the freedom to take shape in the painting.
Poetry and painting mingle together in these paintings of Venice as I remember the light airy canals, the vast planes of sea, the flat slivers of light.
Watercolour let loose seems to be the most appropriate and expressive medium for this subject.
The watercolour painting is unframed on heavy weight archival paper
Size of painting
17 x 12 inches
The Poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is here -
White swan of cities, slumbering in thy nest
So wonderfully built among the reeds
Of the lagoon, that fences thee and feeds,
As sayeth thy old historian and thy guest!
White water-lily, cradled and caressed 5
By ocean streams, and from the silt and weeds
Lifting thy golden pistils with their seeds,
Thy sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest!
White phantom city, whose untrodden streets
Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting
Shadows of palaces and strips of sky;
I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets
Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting
In air their unsubstantial masonry.

Materials used:

Watercolour Paint

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