I'm Callum Innes. This is my studio in Edinburgh. This is, you could call it
my office space but where I make drawings and watercolours, it's clean, it's meant
to be tidy, but mainly I make the watercolours and, as I say, make drawings
through here. And as we go through in here I have the main space I'll work on.
The work in here is not really finished just now, it's all in preparation for a
show, and the black paintings that you see are paintings have just been started.
They all start off with solid black paintings and then eventually we take
the black off and then while they're still wet I will then put a colour
through them again and then take take the colour off. The paintings always
pretend to be either geometric and clean and tidy but this is quite chaotic in
the way that I make them, and then round here paintings that have yet to be
decided upon and sometimes it takes quite a while to look at the painting so
we bring these out periodically and have a look at them and see if they're
actually doing when I think they're doing. Over the last 15, I think 15 years,
I continually go back to watercolour. It's luminosity I can get with the
watercolour, or I can achieve at times with watercolour that I can't
I maybe strive to get with oil paintings. Well, we're trying to do a watercolour but I've got
a cold so excuse me if it doesn't actually work. So I'm going to put a
Delft blue and a translucent orange together but I need to block in the
block first.
The trick is trying not to get too many splatters.
With these particular works I mask them off to start with so I get, this is almost
a square but I get a clean edge which I then break later.
I'm going to give it a
couple of minutes just to soak, it's still wet but not liquid. I'll just clean my hands.
With these particular watercolours that we're talking about and are being shown
at the Tate, there are always two blocks of colour and sometimes two opposite
colours and you really don't know when you put them together exactly what colour
you're going to achieve. I can subtract colour out of them so you get this very
beautiful neutral at times appearing. It's not chance
I'm almost curious about where you can go with the colour. This is just some
water, it's just so I get it right.
In the way that I make these watercolours, I don't make them
every day for three weeks, so I maybe make them if, you know, twice a week between
the oil painting when things are getting too dry or whatever. But they do lead
from one to another, so you get these bodies of work and you get these
sequences that actually can hang together quite well. Let's take a poly-brush
now and I'm going to lift as much as I can out of it to create almost
like a neutral. Some pigments bite different than others.
Some will remain, some you can almost remove almost the entire
colour out of the watercolour.
What I'm going to do is just lay another colour across it
again.
The directness of watercolour is very unforgiving. If you make a mark the mark
stays. You're working back to front because you're working with the
lightness of the paper. You can see there's a slight fault on the paper there where the blue
has actually bitten but you don't know that's going to occur. If I can actually
get it to do something and have attention, or even take a language of
watercolour painting or watercolour forward in my head then it's a
successful thing, if it works.