Robin Purcell, Bartholomew Park, 2009,
watercolor on arches,
12 x 16 inches
| Robin Purcell has a unique style in
which quilt-like patches of color overlap and flow across both
the paper and the landscape. She varies the tone and hue of the
colors, which encourages our eyes to move from one area to
another; notice how this works with the four different patches
of burnt orange (lower left to lower right of the image). More
elaborately, she does the same thing with the variations of the
greens, from the first three triangular shapes in the foreground
to the many shapes changing in intensity as they recede back
through the hills.
Purcell's style has hints of early 20th-century children's illustrated books, with the patchwork landscape of Southwest England, and Vermeer's abstract patches of light and shadow. Michael Newberry |