Sometimes when you visit exhibitions you overhear people saying ‘My child could have painted that’ or ‘I could have made that’. You will recognize these derogatory remarks about contemporary abstract works. What is it that makes some people so anxious about looking at something that they don’t recognize? Why can’t they rely on their intelligence and imagination to decipher an artwork?

If you are fortunate enough to enjoy paintings in both oil and watercolour, then you will note how completely different they are, not in just their look but in how we as painters have to treat them.

In many ways, oil paintings give greater depth and possibly a chance to incorporate very detailed brushwork, but watercolours have the propensity to imbue a painting with transparency, almost an air-filled atmosphere that’s hard to define.