DARTMOUTH FIVE
Misty River, Dart, watercolour, by Paul Riley, 2009
Early Morning, Dittisham, water- colour, by Paul Riley, 2009
PAUL RILEY Paul Riley has always been a painter. Both his parents were artists and he studied at the Kingston school of art, first exhibiting at the royal academy in 1960 aged fifteen. he came to Dittisham by chance twenty years later while working as an architect. His studio and art school at Coombe Farm outside Dittisham have been his centre of operations ever since. Many exhibitions and one-man shows followed in England, Scandinavia, continental Europe, the US and Australia. After art school Riley’s palette was dark, and his inspiration, influenced by the early painting of van Gogh, was drawn from working communities, particularly mining villages in south Wales. Palette, medium and focus changed with travels to the Mediter- ranean. Once in Devon, Riley returned to watercolours, using a free-style brushwork as far removed from architectural drawing as possible. He met Kaldor, Drew and Gillo when he was keen to get to full-time painting again. Riley’s dictum now is restraint, the painting of suggestion. With watercolour it requires above all looking, then patience, skill and a deep knowledge of tools and techniques, and how they interact. The changing waters of the Dart around Dittisham retain a fasci- nation for Riley, who was brought up on the Thames. When the mists come, they can wriggle up the river, leaving patches of landscape clear, blurring others, hiding joints between water and tree, tree and its reflection. in one painting, which is quite small, he uses an oriental-style brush with goat and wolf hair, and plays with wetting the paper, patch by patch, to capture the moving air, reflection and depth. During the snow of 2011 he went out to find the frost had
sharpened the light, clarifying the colours, so that every slope, tree and curve of the river was outlined. Riley uses different brushes here, and a range of masking techniques to get the precision and clarity he wants. In Early morning the light is bouncing off the water around the
jetty, hardly penetrating enough to create reflections. shapes are sharp and black or shrouded, tones are hinted at. The structure is minimal, but the place could be nowhere else.
JOHN DONALDSON
John Donaldson can’t recall a time when he didn’t paint; one of his earliest memories is watching his grandfather paint water- colours. By thirteen, he had discovered oil; he liked its tangibility, the way he could push it around. Now, he does watercolours too. He grew up with music in the same way. In his late teens, he studied composition and classical organ before switching to mod- ern jazz and electronic music. Donaldson came to Dartmouth in 1975 and met the other four of the Dartmouth Five some ten years later. Here, he paints, plays the organ in local churches and does local gigs. He still composes and records music. In painting he tries to catch ‘a place where something has just happened, some shadow has passed, a moving cloud has changed a look.’ He wants to be honest about the unusual and beautiful and the effects of light. He thinks ‘impressionist’ describes his work best, in that it has no hidden narrative, but attempts to interpret a visual moment.
Donaldson is inspired by the Dartmouth area, the south of
France and Italy, as much by the countryside as by intimate scenes of historic houses on the river or cobblestone embankments in the sun, by the energy of bars and cafés, or the peace of sunlit steps rising against the corner of a vine-clad house. He can spend days searching for everyday views that crystallise a transitory but modest moment. Paint and music are synergistic in his work, although he finds the connections between colour, texture and sound less conscious with time. ‘In the simplest terms’, he says, ‘I hear sounds when I paint and see colour when I make music’. In the early 1970s, he painted mostly large abstracts as he listened to music – he remembers Bartok, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Jimi Hendrix and Olivier Messiaen – and actively interpreted what he heard and felt in colour and form. Trying to paint watery pictures more recently to Chopin’s Études and Barcarolles really failed; the process was too literal. Mood is paramount for John in music and he may listen to the more frenetic passages of Verdi’s Requiem or The Prodigy to help reach the ‘speed’ he needs to start painting, but then paints in silence, hearing the music in his head. Painting is more of a physical challenge than music. He has
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