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This group of watercolors was started about
three years ago. The idea was to take themes that I would
normally work out on a large scale and hopefully make very
small paintings that were as ambitious. By making them tiny
and all the same size, I hoped to simplify my decision-making
processes so that I could concentrate on condensing the
feel and scope of each subject.
On the way, the work began to split into two
groups: broad landscape and smaller views that were based
around floral motifs. This idea of using the intimate feeling
that watercolor can have to represent small corners of nature
goes back to John Sell Cotman and other early English watercolorists.
The landscapes tend to be more of a reflection of my long
term interest in natural environments as they exist within
the confines of everyday, man-made surroundings; the woods
just off the highway or the river under the bridge, for
example, have always been fascinating to me. These views,
like the corners of nature, are places that I frequently
pass by or linger at.
It takes me generally a long time to distill
a paintable subject from a location. I often have to see
it at different times of day and in different seasons before
I arrive at an idea. At that point I may make several attempts
at the same subject before I get one I am happy with. There
are fifty or more paintings that did not make it into this
group of twenty-one.
This interest in backyard nature goes, I suppose,
back to when I first began to paint with watercolor as a
young teenager, and discovered that many of my local subjects
had already been painted by Charles Burchfield, who had
grown up about eight miles away from my parents' home. Finding
this out was both frustrating and exciting, but it showed
me that an important artist had seen the ordinary things
and places that I saw and had made something extraordinary
from them. This inspiration I still carry with me and I
think ultimately that is what the work in this show is about.
Richard Estell
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