I’ve always admired the water colours of Emil Nolde and especially the glowing luminosity of his colours. This luminosity is achieved mostly through his mastery of colour combinations and being able to compose with colour. His technique with watercolour is very different from that used by most Western watercolour painters and more of a fusion of Eastern approaches especially in his use of highly absorbent Japanese paper. This paper quite literally pulls the paint in so that the pigments are captured within the weave of the paper rather than sitting on the surface of the highly sized non-absorbent paper of western water colourists. This paper gives a luminosity that is hard to achieve in any other way, and can take multiple applications of paint, so much so that the paper almost becomes paint.
Nolde mixed his own highly pigmented watercolours in tins which he carried in a briefcase, with each tin having its own brush so he didn’t have to worry about mixing colours when the inspiration was at its strongest.
This body of work is my attempt to try to understand the technique that Nolde used and most of them are a searching for something as yet unfound. All of these started by staining absorbent Japanese paper with highly pigmented water colour, allowing imagery to form from the paint.
Some of these probably finished with the majority still evolving.