Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter

Hill Top on a Winter Night

circa late 1890s (?)

     Just as with words in her diaries, Mrs Potter portrays the same degree of love for her home with watercolour. Here, light escapes from Hill Top's open entrance and from the windows beside and above it, casting an image of comfort and solitude in the midst of looming bushes and branches, each spidery and stricken from the bite of northern temperatures. The sloped drive, padded down with a hint of cart wheels, draws the eye up and out of the cold towards the bay of human (or animal, for that matter) activity, making us wonder - in terms of Mrs Potter's imagination - what could be happening behind those walls.

     The small size of this piece (about that of a regular hand palm) emphasises her skill at rendering what seem like fine details out of carefully thought-out blobs and blotches of (or lack of) colour. Knit together on such a small scale they form an intimate scene, but with closer inspection these details become, ironically, out of focus. This is the magic that lies behind many of Mrs Potter's stories: addressing the minds of children, she weaves together common details of moral with bright interpretations of animal life, creating on the whole an imaginative tale that is in fact very realistic. Read too closely and the tale loses perspective - perhaps it is even called too flowery or frilly - but when seen from a relaxed distance, as with this illustration, its true message is seen at its best.

Vassily Kandinsky

Vassily Kandinsky

Russischer Reiter

circa 1902

     It is strange that, having stared at this work for years, it is still difficult to describe why it is so strong a piece. With a voice made from its colours and contours, Kandinsky's illustration is able to maintain a consistent degree of visual intensity all year round. It is not a cliché image such as a bouquet of flowers (which, however attractive it may be, risks losing strength with the change of season or when paired with another group of flowers), but an image whose voice disguises and alters according to mood and place - one whose voice acts as a shield against the effects of time.

     Like the style of composition itself - with objects slightly blurred in outline, blotched in pools of rich reds, greens or black - it is an image who speaks the particular tongue of its viewer, one that connects almost personally with him or her. It shape-shifts and moulds itself to their tastes, sometimes depending on factors as small as the moment's lighting or scent, all the while remaining the distinct landscape Kandinsky painted it as. His rider tells them, us, to look at that great blue reflective lake; to feel the peeling birch trunks and the taut hide of the horse (as theatrical as it is, almost like one belonging to a toy-soldier); and to listen for any chimes or chirps ringing from the gold onions and the birds in the pines. The rider even turns on his saddle, imploring us to be a part of his scene, to live with it and in it every day so as to know it as a friend, as someone who lasts forever. With that said, who can really describe a true friendship easily, in simple words?

Stephen Rose

Stephen Rose

The Worn Leather Chair

circa 2012

     An old, torn, pathetic-looking armchair glorified for its overuse and obvious mistreatment. Is this beautiful? Does this scene bring out a pitiless kind of sadness in the viewer? Does is evoke shock? Seeing as none of us really views a piece of furniture as an animate, 'real' thing (or do we?), could anyone really care for something so crude?

     Yes. This answer speaks on behalf of no matter how small the minority is who treats and cares for its so-called non-living things as parts of their personality, as their defining tags of identity. This chair means something to someone, to this contemporary artist - so much so that he immortalised its portrait so lovingly, so accurately and realistically, down to the dull shine of the legs and railings and to the fraying tongues of the stained leather cushion and back, that the naked presence of this chair is far more striking as it is now than if a bejewelled Catherine Deneuve sat herself down in it for a short rest. This chair is a slice of time; it shows slash after slash of days gone by, of moments lived and lost. It shows age at its ugliest. It shows that Rose attempts to bring out the truth of how the things we choose to label as unimportant or silly can manifest themselves in tangible forms, in things that simply cannot be swept under the rug. Slightly askew in its frame, a bit wobbly here and there, this chair proves this truth - thus Rose succeeds.

the Wiener Werkstätte: Rudolf Kalvach

Rudolf Kalvach

Postcard (no. 148)

circa 1895 to early twentieth century

     A puzzle-like parade of vagabonds and weirdos. A demon-possessed chamaeleon hisses at a black racoon; a panther cub as dark as Indian ink perches warningly on top of a grotesque yellow claw of the tallest male stick figure, his dress robes seemingly made of red button mushrooms (and his other claw caressing the buttocks of what looks like a very large and polka-dotted armadillo). Beneath the cub is a sun-burnt neckless dinosaur (tail included) with numerous pits and cavities and a pair of over-sized contact lenses (of which we can only see one, thankfully). In the sky above is nothing but the deepest blue of nothingness characteristic of the waning minutes before nightfall, topping a terrain of green-bordered hills and white-sanded bays tumbling down to a narrow Matisse-cut strip of lake. Making up the rear of the parade is a snake-necked, chicken pox-stricken rooster whose remaining body - if one could name it that - is made up of a many-tentacled, red-brick road patterned crinoline dress, the latter being covered slightly by a yellow-specked cape. And lastly, leading this character is a snobby-looking figure who, nose high in the air, clearly thinks her yellow skin colour goes very well indeed with her putrid green, fur-lined manteau (a bad choice, no doubt).

     Whatever this scene is meant to depict, the joy of guessing is at least meant to be neverending.

Siegfried Stoitzner

Siegfried Stoitzner

Wood Gnome and Squirrel

circa early 1900s

     Are we looking through a lense? Our perspective is narrowed and focused on the central part of the scene where the bark of the branch is clearest, as are the warm tufts of orange squirrel hair and the scrawny fingers and ferocious white coif of the little man, giving us the sense that we are huge in comparison to these two creatures over whose squabble we loom. The details, however minimal, are well-drawn. They tell us that the artist was skilled in executing anatomy no matter how small the scale or how playful and comical (as this picture is) the subject. He and Arthur Rackham share the same foggy depiction of colour and the same motionless animation of fantasy-based figures, each bringing to life a world that undoubtedly catches the attention of both children and adults.

     The watercolour is odd, though: either it was never completed during the artist's lifetime or, as already noted, it is meant to appear slightly out of focus. Surely the dense green wall of foliage has faded nevertheless due to constant handling without protective gloves (as natural hand oil tends to eat away or dissolve less-durable media as watercolours), but this is probably not the sole reason for its fading: the picture's edges are too evenly paled all round. However, having once sold for nearly 1'000 Euros the fading clearly does not affect the picture's evident charm - nor does it seem to interrupt the creatures' 'whose-nut-is-whose?' argument.