Product Details
An original framed watercolour painting by Elizabeth Sutherland.
Material: watercolour on watercolour paper, framed within wooden frame choice with mount.
Signed bottom corner.
Unframed size approx: 12.7 x 17.5cm (5 x 6.9 inches)
Framed size approx: 27.5 x 32.3cm (10.8 x 12.7 inches)
Frame options: Oak with mount, Putty Wood with mount, Black Wood with mount, White Wood with mount
Please note: Our framers are recognised by the Fine Art Trade Guild for their quality because the custom frames have tightly pinned corners, and are made from precision cut wood in England, made bespoke for each order. All our frames are glazed with our Clarity+ Perspex. It's cut from the highest quality acrylic sheet that's both crystal clear, but also safe and filters out 99% of UV light to protect the artwork.
Read more about our FRAMING WORKSHOP here
THE STORY
Elizabeth Sutherland leads us through winter sea mists, along hedgerows and cottages and down to the sea on this island she calls home.
Living year round on Nantucket, a tiny isolated island off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, artist Elizabeth Sutherland is in a unique position to observe the seasons and all the changes they bring; from great Atlantic storms to gentle sea mists that nourish the uniquely adapted native flora and fauna which she gathers and brings back to her studio.
Famously described by Herman Melville in Moby Dick as an island "away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse", Elizabeth Sutherland's prolific watercolour observations reveal an island bursting with shapes and textures, colour and life, even in the depths of winter.
This new collection consists of over one-hundred watercolour paintings, which were created during the quiet months of winter.
Throughout these works there is a great sense of calm and stillness that only deep winter can bring. Looking at the collection, we can almost feel the mist rolling in and hear the cry of a gull, the clinking of boats moored for the winter and the fog horn sounding from one of the many lighthouses on the island.
This exquisite hand-painted collection is not a scientific survey of the island's flora and fauna, rather an artist's collection of observations, and through these works we are taken on a very special tour of this windswept island.
Each small painting is a joy in itself, a fragment, a glimpse into the artist's view-point which is to slow down and look. Through Elizabeth's work, a pair of balancing stones can become a giant mountain, seaweeds turn into monumental forms and a single leaf becomes an entire island.
"My work is deeply influenced by the portrayal of nature by John James Audubon and the poetic graphic forms of Katsushika Hokusai. I think of both these artists as I work on my own interpretations of the Nantucket landscape."
It is interesting that Elizabeth references Hokusai, an artist known for repeating different views of the same subject, famously his thirty-six views of Mount Fuji. Looking at these island paintings in groups, a wonderful sense of movement and observational repetition can be seen, which Elizabeth refers to as her 'handwriting'.
Rows of foggy cottages with giant hedges, stacked towers of pebbles, ribbons of seaweed, mussel shells, shorebirds and even the silhouettes of the elm trees that surround her home are painted with a repetitive flow that makes the collection sway with the rhythm of the island.
Intriguingly, Elizabeth explains that she prefers to work with a single 1-inch flat brush which allows her to 'skilfully carve shapes from dynamic pools of granulated watercolour paint'. And she does indeed seem to 'carve', sculpting the watery paint into tactile forms; the seaweed somehow feels slippery, the stones feel heavy, the stacked pebbles feel as though they may fall, the insects seem to have just landed on the paper and native flowers appear to be pressed from real specimens.
All of this is done with Elizabeth's sense of play and unusually bold use of watercolour paint, a perfect medium for exploring an island which is so saturated by the weather and sea.
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