Water Flowing XVI
St James’s Park Series
€165.00
Watercolor on W & N Cotton Paper.
25 W x 32 H cm.
2026
Signed Front B/R.
Unframed.
Unique Piece 1/1.
Cetificate of authenticity printed.
Blockchain QR certified by Certs 365
This watercolor belongs to the St. James’s series: a small-format, contemplative sheet that keeps only the movement of water through the park. Soft translucent blues meet deeper indigo and a few precise lines. The white of the paper does most of the work. Nothing is named—no bridge, no pelican, no palace façade. What remains is current, reflection, and the park’s double nature: a designed ground in which water is still allowed to behave.
St James’s has always been water under a contract. Charles II’s canal, laid with André Mollet, ran straight for display. John Nash, in the 1820s, broke that line into a serpentine lake. The terrain kept both memories: axis and curve, architecture and drift. This composition balances the same two tempers. Geometric structures—a cross, a tall interval, the meeting of edges—evoke the park as a planned space, a royal enclosure in the city. Organic shapes—a pale disc of wash, a darker lobe, forms that swell and taper—evoke the lake as it actually moves: gentle currents, the pattern a current leaves when it is not asked to pose. Fluid and ruled occupy one field, as they do on the ground.
The blues are the climate of the series. Translucent passages sit on the tooth of the paper and let the grain become light. Deeper tones gather along a ridge or at a junction, a sudden depth, a reflection that has more weight. Some edges bloom, the cauliflower of wet into less wet; some are drawn and held. That mix is the movement: water that spreads, water that is conducted. Minimalist reserve is not emptiness. It is transparency—the glare on the lake, the interval between two thoughts of the park, the air that makes a small work feel large.
A small format suits this subject. St James’s is not Fontainebleau’s long canal; it is an intimate royal water, walked, circled, overlooked by offices. An intimate sheet can hold that scale without rhetoric. Collectors who want a view will not find one. Collectors who want the quiet energy of water in a designed nature will find the essence the series has been after: not the postcard, the flow.
Light is the paper. It cuts the forms so that they do not close into a puzzle. Pure pigment, uncorrected, meets the sheet as matter. Where the wash is thin, colour is barely a temperature. Where it is fuller, it granulates and the blue becomes mineral. The linear structures are the same pigment, only more decided—a bank, a path, the memory of the canal under the romance. Each stroke is a declaration. There is no later adjustment.
Texture keeps the balance honest. You see the weave inside the pale circle and through the darker crossings. Accident—the frayed edge of a lobe, the slight bleed at a joint—is the natural part of a park that no superintendent can finish. Dynamic and serene are not opposites here. The lake is both. The painting is both.
What the work offers is St James’s reduced to water’s movement across a distinctive terrain: soft blue, deep blue, a few lines, and a great deal of light. The city stays outside the colour. Inside, there is only flow, structure, and the paper.


