Breaking The Rules Of Watercolour, Shirley Trevena – Book Review

Yeah, anyway, this book wasn’t what I was expecting.  I don’t know whether that’s because I never knew what this book was about or because I did know once but forgot.  With a name like Breaking The Rules Of Watercolour and chapter headings that sound as if each one concerns breaking a particular rule, this sounds like one of those books that’s all about freshening up your watercolours.  New ideas to make your work different.  Like a book by, say, Ann Blockley or Gordon MacKenzie.  But it’s not.

No, this is a book about painting abstracts.  In particular, almost all the work in here is abstractified still life (although there’s a bit of landscape too).  There’s no big chunky bits of of advice here either: it’s just Shirley talking through ten of her paintings.  And these aren’t those “paint along with me” knitting pattern exercises that I hate.  In fact I wouldn’t even all them demonstrations.  Because they’re not about how Shirley painted them: they’re about how Shirley thought her way through them.  How she picked the subject, where she started painting, how she changed her mind in the middle and why, how she arranged objects in the painting, how she arranged colours and set up balances and clashes.  It’s all the sort of stuff that I’m interested in hearing about, especially for an abstract painting.

It’s not a book that’s easy to take notes on.  It’s a book to immerse yourself in.  Like Spock on Star Trek doing a mind meld, this is about getting into Shirley’s head.  Finding out not what she’s thinking but how and why she’s thinking particular things.  You come out at the end of the book thinking differently rather than knowing new stuff.  It’s so hard to explain.

But I know now that this is a book about abstracts that I definitely needed.  Painting abstracts is one of those subjects where understanding all the thought put into is so much more important than just understanding how to draw or make brisk marks or add textures, making it very different to other forms of artwork.  And this book is a great way to learn about abstracts.

As for the other things that I always talk about:

– this is a 128-page hardback

– the book has a voice.  That should be obvious as we’re really getting into Shirley’s head.

– is the artwork inspiring?  Maybe a little.  But should it be?  This is a book on abstracts – we should all be doing our own thing.

Anyway, this review looks a bit all over the place and not focused.  But that’s because this isn’t a book of nicely organised and ordered tips: it’s ten random journeys through somebody’s brain, sometimes taking in the same scenes.  I can’t chop it up into well defined sections.

I do need to give it a score though.  Although this is really is a very good book and the first of its type that I’ve seen, I don’t think it’s a galactico, so it gets four palettes here (and five stars on Amazon).

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