Naomi Tydeman - Marsh Moon - Watercolour & Silver Leaf
I live on the edge of a shallow sandy bay with a large tidal reach. I'm down there every day with the dog and have often considered the simplicity of a straight line and a circle - the horizon and the rising sun or moon - alongside the complexity of patterns that water makes in the sand. Over the years that I have been painting watercolours I have come to love the times when I allow Nature to take over. Too often we try to impose our will on something that has a life of its own, and sometimes just standing back a little and allowing something else to take over will let something happen that you could never have conceived of.
Naomi Tydeman - Breaker - Watercolour
Using watercolour to paint with is like using the elements that Nature uses to create a landscape - pigments and minerals, water, gravity, evaporation and time. And it's when all those things are allowed to operate without intervention from me that I am most happy with the result. Sometimes I just feel like an observer, although the hands and mind are still working, still busy, still concentrating, still paying the utmost attention, there is still the underlying discipline to just 'let'. This is scary sometimes, because part of me is such a control freak, but I have to concede that the most beautiful and spontaneous things occur when nature is left to her own devices.
Naomi Tydeman - Twilight - Watercolour
Web: www.naomitydeman.co.uk
Text and images: Copyright © Naomi Tydeman RI 2011
Text and images: Copyright © Naomi Tydeman RI 2011
