Sometimes There’s Very Little Point and sometimes you just have to be bold and slosh paint on expensive, fine handmade paper and then cut it up and splosh paste all over it, risking tearing it, and stick it on something else. Painters can daub and scrape and layer and sand and wash out a canvas but paper generally has a one-way ticket. Painters I know will labour and fret over a canvas for weeks or months trying to “resolve” it. Working with paper you have to do the fretting and thinking before you start: then, when you are full to the brim with the idea, you have to attack it full-bloodedly as you have little leeway to correct errors unless you are using the tamest of techniques on the most robust of materials. Get it wrong and it’s firelighters!
This piece, 17/50 Collages Before Christmas, involved me in much testing of watercolours in varying densities of washes on various Himalayan mitsumata and lokta papers watercolour as I had previously used a very limited range of colour on these papers. What surprised me is how much difference there is in the nature of the edges between painting before or after cutting – subtle but important.
The title is me playing with description and started from a delight I took in one of the little points I created on the cut edges. The working title was Sometimes There’s A Very Little Point
