Aquatic Veil II

St James’s Park series

€165.00


Watercolor on W & N Cotton Paper.
23 W  x 30.5 H cm.
2026
Signed Front B/R.
Unframed.

Unique Piece 1/1.
Cetificate of authenticity printed.
Blockchain QR certified by Certs 365

AQUATIC VEIL II (St James’s Park series)
This watercolor belongs to the St. James’s series: a large body of abstract contemporary work that seeks the ideal essence of the park rather than its postcard. The subject here is not the pelicans, not the bridge, not the skyline of Whitehall. It is the water’s directions—the way a royal lake still remembers a canal, and the way that canal was later told to wander.

St James’s is the oldest of the royal parks, taken in under Henry VIII. James I drained and pooled it; Rosamond’s Pond and the first islands already taught the ground to hold water. After the Restoration, Charles II, formed by exile and by French gardens, had André Mollet lay out a formal park around a show canal: tree-lined, almost half a mile long, excavated in 1660, a straight instrument for display and for walking. In the 1820s John Nash, for George IV, broke that instrument. The canal was deformalised into a serpentine lake of some 4.6 hectares, running north-east to south-west the length of the park. Formal avenues became winding paths. Duck Island was reinstated. Water was given new directions: not only the old axis, but curves, inlets, a changing bank.

The painting states those directions as a few decisions on paper. At the top, a horizontal wash of diluted blue-grey sits like a distant sheet of water or a sky that has come down to the lake. Below it, parallel pale lines run across the field—quiet, almost ruled—the memory of the canal’s discipline, of weirs, of the alignments Mollet required. A darker curve then takes over: indigo, thicker, turning and dropping into an angle, a change of mind. From it a thinner stem goes out, a T of flow, a channel that has chosen another course. At the foot of the sheet a broader pool gathers, rimmed with a darker edge, the lake as a body rather than a line. A fragment of a second curve appears at the left, as if the serpentine continued off the page. The essence is this: water that was once told to go straight, and water that was later told to turn.

Ideal essence, in this series, means withholding the furniture of the park. No foliage, no Horse Guards, no crowd on the bridge. What remains is the hydraulic thought that has occupied the same ground twice—once as French canal, once as picturesque lake—and still occupies it as a single living surface. Directions are not arrows. They are the contrast between the pale horizontals and the dark curve, between reserve and pool, between a system that wanted perspective and a system that wanted romance.

Light is the paper. The coarse tooth stays open across most of the sheet, so white is the glare of the lake on a still day, the interval between two decisions, the air over the water. Pure pigment, transparent and uncorrected, meets that grain without artifice. The top wash is cloudy, granulating, a climate rather than a shape. The dark curve is more mineral, a bank or a cut, colour that has been given weight so the change of direction can be felt. The lower pool sinks and keeps a tide-line, a darker skin where the wash has settled. Each stroke is a declaration of matter. There is no later adjustment.

Texture keeps the park tactile. You see the weave inside the pale bars and through the indigo. The hand is visible in the slight tremor of a long line, in the soft bleed of the upper rectangle, in the way the curve thickens as it turns. Accident is part of the essence—the uneven fade, the stain in the pool—because St James’s water was never only a plan. The Tyburn’s old course, the canal, Nash’s concrete bed of the 1850s, the present lake: all of it is conducted, and all of it still moves.

What the work offers is the park reduced to its water directions: axis and serpentine, canal and lake, stated in a few gestures of pigment against the open page. The city presses on every side. The watercolor keeps only the flow, the turn, and the light.