Last Friday, I made my way to North Parade - a street nestled between Summertown and Central Oxford, festooned with multi-coloured lights and home to an array of boutique shops. I was there to visit the gallery, Meakin - Parsons x Hannah Payne, for a private view of painter Eleanor May Watson's collection Vibrant Life.
The space was spare but inviting - white walls and hardwood floors spread over two rooms, accented with small green houseplants and an ornate bouquet of berry-coloured blooms accented with cabbage roses. The paintings, in varying sizes, were spaced evenly throughout, with oil and acrylic images grouped towards one end of the space, and watercolours towards the other.
Watson created most of the paintings while stuck at home this summer, during a period of heightened creativity. Her fascination with the still life dates back to lockdown, and its externally imposed restraints. In her house, she’d build tableaus on her tabletops, photographing them and sometimes merging multiple images into one to create her references.
There’s a rich and emphatic feel to the oil and acrylic pieces, gothic in their intensity and props: white pillar candles, lit and dripping; a goblet-like glass of wine; an artisanal platter; a gleaming dinner plate. These paintings use warm harvest colours: plummy purples, mustard golds, fierce pomegranate reds and dark kale greens.
Monet once painted the same haystacks 25 times at different times of the day: using them as a backdrop for his true subject: the transience of light. Likewise, light itself is very much the protagonist in Watson's images: the way it shines through peony petals or bounces off a glass vase. The waifish, wobbly quality she grants to the candle’s flame emphasizes this further. The bold, swooping brushstrokes give the feel of an artist capturing a moment before it's gone forever. There’s a visceral feel to the paint, which appears wet to the touch in some places, and elsewhere gathers in tiny scabs on the gessoed board.
Watson took her inspiration from landscapes as well as other still lifes, and the effect recalls that period of lockdown where our worlds shrank to our living rooms - the scope may have shrunk, but the range and depth remain. This is also evident in how she plays with scale; in On This Summer Day Among Shadows I and II she paints the same tableau - wine glass, candle, flowers - on a small board and then, mesmerizingly, across a huge canvas.
Elsewhere, in Washed By Morning Sky, delicate predawn light becomes an explosion of colour, dousing a houseplant in blues and whites and teals.
Watson coaxes an immediacy out of the still life, reminding us that while the subject is immobile, it is still very much alive, and will soon wither or rot. Even the candles will burn themselves out.
This wild beauty of this reminded me most not of another painter but of photographer Maisie Cousins, whose images of food and flowers in stages of ripeness and decay experiment with radiance and rot in strange and startling ways.
While the watercolours are also expressive and loose (Bernhard Vogel was an influence) they feel remote. Ambiguous landscapes sprawl and blank canvas spaces become sources of light, as in an overblown polaroid. In Leafless Eye uses a slightly queasy combo of pea green, bright yellow and aubergine to illuminate its mystery foliage. Hard To Find, conversely, employs dainty shades and symmetry to make its floral subject seem timeless, like a strange tapestry. In other paintings, Watson uses a sharp cool green that pools like pure chlorophyll on the canvas: to capture both the depth of night and the sodden leaves post-rain.
Overall, these watercolours feel oddly foreboding, there’s a stillness to them, a cool distance to the colours and abstraction (the exception being All The Colours That Go Into Day, a large, thrilling abstract piece featuring a storm of colour and movement - one of the highlights of the show). Despite ostensibly having the same subject, the images are in a way each other’s inverse: the storybook beauty of the watercolours counters the vivid and voluptuous oil and acrylic works.
What unifies the collection is its tenacious and exciting use of colour and committed exploration of light. This is an enchanting, transporting exhibition, I urge you to go and see it.