Open To Open
October 11th 2024
Bec Watson’s richly palette knifed paintings are an invitation to open your mind and step into a sunlight infused world inhabited by people in shorts and sneakers. Essentially Australian, we have all been to gatherings like this; the surf carnival, the outback races or the mountain bike meeting.
In Australian Impressionism we see depiction of figures bathed in Antipodean sunshine by Julian Ashton and Tom Roberts where dark tones are rare and the palette couldn’t be further from England. Bec Watson’s influences are clear but her major inspiration is Frederick McCubbin, a different kind of Impressionist. Close up his work is a thickly crusted surface of abstract impasto paint and while the sentimental narratives he depicts are very 19th Century his technique entices the viewer to run their fingers over splendid abstract mark making.
Influenced by the French Impressionists, McCubbin knew the work of Monet, painter of light. Bec also describes her first encounter with Claude Monet’s painting:
One of my greatest influences was a moment when I saw one of Monet’s paintings. At first I couldn’t tell what it was as I arrived at it very closely but then when I got around to the other side of the room I looked back and there it was! I love the works of the impressionists particularly for the way that things seem so perfect like a face or a hand… and then when you look at it closely it’s not there at all.
An abstract portraitist while studying her Masters in Contemporary Art at the University of Tasmania, Bec developed her interest in visual perception and developed visual ambiguity through painting with head averted. This peripheral style was succeeded by working with the non dominant hand, allowing more control with the palette knife while still avoiding the mimetic. As Bec explains;
I am strongly driven to create works that are ambiguous in form and meaning. I love leaving things open, unfinished, blurry, and non-descript, that they may be seen at first in the unknown and then speak to the viewer about the viewer’s own perspective.
