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Piet Lapborn 1943 1965-1970 1986-1993 Works mainly on paper: |
Text catalogue 7th International Watercolour Festival - Piet Lap
I am, by nature, an inquisitive person. That is why I like travelling. I am not sure whether this urge comes from the desire to go and paint somewhere,or, the other way round, painting is just an alibi to travel. Let us say the truth is somewhere in between. Anyhow, I prefer to travel light and the simple watercolour-equipment goes best with my restlessness. I love making watercolours. I am a watercolourist for almost 40 years: a grown-up boy who is still messing around with a paintbox and who practises a profession of which uselessness is the essence. Remarkable, that one can still be so fascinated by the colours of a Moroccan soukh, the tragic carcasses of shipwrecks in a bay in Brittany or the theatrical changing light of the Highlands.
Of course, this is all a form of Romanticism. I love remote places. Nowhere else as on the Scottish Western Isles I experience stronger that being exposed to the magic of these islands a man can be marked for life, leaving him entangled in inexplicable enthousiasms for lazy days, bright skies and the noise of an encircling sea.
I never felt figuration a burden to shake off, as was the case, for decades, in mainstream-art. On the contrary, I look upon working after observation as a source of elementary painters’pleasure: you see better and more.
Starting a new watercolour is like starting all over again, from the beginning, tabula rasa. Your paper is frightening white, you get nervous and in your brain a vague scenario builds up: what to do, in which order, which pace. Failure always lies in wait and you know that there is only little chance of making something really good. What keeps us going on is this feeling that hopefully never leaves us: the best work has still to be made, wait and see, tomorrow, or the day after…