Everard Longland – June 2007

The Wivenhoe Gallery



June Exhibition:  ‘Shifting Imaginations’  by  EVERARD LONGLAND

Saturday9th June – Thursday 5th July 2007 

Everard has lived and painted in Wivenhoe for over twenty years. Some of you will already know his flower paintings. He is a linguist by training but an artist by inclination. 

Watercolour has been Everard’s chosen medium. Its immediacy and fluidity have many advantages over stolid oil paint, nut its runaway tendencies can lead to disaster. It can be unforgiving; yet its translucency is unequalled. It turns to mud at the blink of an eye, but its depiction of light, particularly of our particularly English misty light has no comparison. And it lends itself to experiment. 

In the exhibition, Everard has tried to use watercolour to advantage; letting the colours flow freely on the paper using accidental invention; emphasizing unplanned invention; emphasizing unplanned textures in ever-changing mixes in unexpected places.  The paintings discover new shapes and relationships for themselves, contrasting the usual with the unknown. Counterpoint creates a harmonic whole of pattern, value, tone and colour.

The finished painting is open to the viewer to complete and interpret. The viewer is a contributor to the act of creation albeit through shifting imaginations and the unconscious. Mystery and magic are the surprise elements – an intriguing riddle to be solved by the artist and viewer. 

The artist’s labels are a personal, sometimes arbitrary label. The viewer may wish to ignore the title and find his /her own, or none. Do not be guided by labels alone!