A Little Blob of Red
“Anyone can do it,” Richard Cockwell tells me as I gaze in wonderment at his latest watercolour landscape. Then, as if to prove it, he takes a mix of seemingly random colours and with a few sweeps of his brush has created a familiar hillside with stone projections picked out in the dappled evening sunlight.
Richard only took up painting when he was sixty years old, although he had an interest in sculpture. During his time on the Legislative Assembly, Richard would often doodle on the side of the order papers, “I listen better when I’m doodling,” and the results can still be seen hanging on the office wall at Gilbert House, saved from the shredder. It was during his time as a Member of the Legislative Assembly when Richard took up painting, “There was a ten day gap in between conferences whilst I was in the UK, so I took a course on watercolours,” Richard picks out a brush from the many sitting in a jar on his kitchen table, “brushes are a very personal choice.”
He is currently working on three quite large commissions at his preferred painting spot in his kitchen. It is impractical to paint in watercolour outside, “It’s either too windy, too wet or too dry. I tried painting in the Atacama desert once. It didn’t work out well.” Here in the light kitchen, with a window looking out towards the Two Sisters, the thick textured paper is set at an angle and he mixes an ultramarine blue with a burnt sienna to create a charcoal like black for some mountain detail. “I didn’t allow my students to use black or white,” he says as we talk about the painting courses he used to run here in the Falklands, “but you don’t use many colours anyway, I’ve probably only used about five or six on this painting.” There’s a surprising patch of red flora in the painting’s bottom corner, “The old watercolour artists say you should have a spot of red somewhere,” Richard then covers up the corner and the whole painting dulls ever so slightly. The Falkland’s landscape is not without its splashes of red; whether it’s in a house roof or a rusting tin shed, and these touches, now pointed out to me, make the painting stand out.
There’s a great depth to Richard’s paintings; a realism which, to the non-painter, seems to be one of magical construct. Apparently, it is all to do with perspective, “people tend to paint what they think they see, not what they actually see,” he points to the Falklands sky, perfectly replicated, with a looming dark cloud on the horizon. I suggest it is an ominous sign he has added, almost as a social comment on today’s society. “No,” he replies, “It’s just the Falkland’s weather.”
For twelve months after his first dip into watercolour, Richard stuck to small paintings and did a series on outdoor privies, but he finds it difficult now to paint a smaller picture, “This one here is probably a bit too big for me,” he indicates a painting ready to be delivered to a customer, “I’ve found the bigger they are, the more detail you have to put in, so it takes longer.”
The most difficult part of painting is the start, Richard tells me, “I have to think about it for a long time. I often paint the picture in my head first.” Even when the painting is almost finished, Richard finds he can fiddle with it for days. He props up his paintings by the television so he can assess them over the evening. It is more difficult to adjust watercolours though; you can make the colour stronger, but big changes are more or less impossible, unlike acrylics where you can simply paint over the top of the offending item. When I take a look in his paint box, I pull out a small tube of titanium white acrylic paint and ask him whether he’s experimenting with other mediums. “That was for a seagull,” he explains, “I needed to get a really white white, and so had to use that or gouache.”
“I haven’t painted for ages,” Richard brings out two recent pictures; large beautiful landscapes you could simply reach out and feel the atmosphere within them, “It is unusual for me to have this many paintings in the house, but these past few weeks I’ve had a few commissions. It’s been nice to get on with it.” he smiles, “It keeps me out of the pubs.”
