Concrete Watercolour
(version 2.0)

In December of 2005 Paul Kovanen invited Tony Cooper and myself to his studio to see a series of tiny watercolour abstractions he was working on. We discussed automatism of the1950's Quebec abstract school and how Paul was allowing an extreme automatic to take place in the painting by releasing the thin watercolour paint onto the damp surface and allowing it to flow freely like osmosis. We also talked about illusionary depth and scale. Museum and well known abstractions are usually large and illusion of depth was not emphasized because early abstraction is most correct if it contains no illusions.

Out of that meeting I developed my own series of watercolour abstractions which I call "concrete", a term which Roy Kiyooka (1926-1994) used to clarify an art of process which was called "abstraction". Roy felt that the term, "abstract", could refer all art which contains ideas, construction, or a literary motivation which are abstractions. Kiyooka felt it was necessary to emphasize that there was little or no idea or thought or language involved in concrete art. The phrase, "what you see is what you get" is most applicable. Concrete painting is an attempt to go directly to the aesthetics of chance and gesture and, in that way, get to the native charm of the materials.

	I had already begun exploring the concrete while working on my studio portion of A Camp before the meeting with Paul and Tony, who were partners in that project. I was having tremendous difficulty painting a representation of water falling in a brook. Twice I obliter-ated bungled representations with an irritated dash of India ink. Those two paintings, not included in this show, set the size of the concrete series the same as the A Camp Comic, 31 x 23 cm (9 x 12 inches) on cold pressed Arches watercolour.
	I decided, although interesting, it was cynical and labor intensive to create a representational image and then obliterate it. After I saw what Paul was doing I began by releasing watercolour first onto dampened paper allow-ing it to dry and building up a concrete painting on the dried layers with more watercolour to simulate a pers-pective depth illusion. Finally I attacked the dried abs-traction with India ink and the Oriental calligraphic brush.
	The next stage of the development was to, as Harold Klunder (1943- ) says, "knock back" the dark imagery with white acrylic and European brushes.
	I began applying airbrushed rhombus and triangular shapes outlined with Indian ink applied with a steel pen and ruler over the layers. This is probably the direction I will take on a more formal series of abstractions in acrylic.
	I found myself becoming as concerned about the underlying levels as if they were representational paint-ings of the cataracts. I realized that in my haste I had not properly exposed the underlying structures. I began folding back the series and leaving off at earlier stages of development. I experimented with applications using splatter, dripping, and Oriental brush calligraphic strokes which were applied to create illusions of depth.
	I saw the beauty of releasing the watercolour onto the moist rag paper as Paul had been doing to let the visco-sity of the paint and the gravity of the earth form the composition.
	Finally, rather than flooding the entire paper with water, I painted using the Oriental brush blindly dipped in plain water and then dripped and flung lean pigmented water-colour onto the paper to expose the "secret" concrete calligraphy and allow the paint to flow auto-matically.
more information :	email: barrysmylie@rogers.com
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