Wash: Watercolour in contemporary art

The paradox of watercolour, regarded for years as the amateur’s medium, is that it is unbelievably difficult to use. Its transparency means that adding to a painting will inevitably make it darker, while oil paint’s glutinous thickness allows the artist to layer on light like icing on a cake. Watercolour is made up of films of pigment, delicately held together by gum arabic, layered by drying wate

r over sheets of paper. Great cunning is required to get exactly what you want. This exhibition brings together the work of artists who rarely if ever work in the medium, with those well known for their expertise in it; those highly regarded and those little known. It is a chance to see watercolour used in an exploratory, chancey way, hung right next to work made with planning and forethought; work made in the light of ancient tradition against work that might seem to deny the very idea of a past. Francesca Flowers is a curator and musician, and Charles Williams is an artist and writer whose book ‘Basic Watercolour: How To Paint What You See’ prompted this show. Margate, with its association with Turner, arguably Britain’s greatest Romantic watercolourist, seemed the ideal place.