Boyle wins prestigious awards for watercolours

Damian McCarney

A Virginia artist has won a prestigious prize for her watercolour which currently adorns the wall of an exhibition in Farmleigh Gallery.
Michelle Boyle was awarded the 2019 Annual WCSI Presidents Award and the Dr Pat McCabe Cup for her painting ‘Luna and the Flood’ as a work of distinction.
Michelle has a number works currently on display in the Water Colour Society of Ireland’s 165th annual exhibition at the Dublin venue.
Breath-taking portraits of two victims of air strikes on Aleppo (left), Syria are included in the exhibition. However it Michelle’s unusual depiction of a deluge in her studio pouring out into an exterior landscape, that was selected by judges. It claimed top spot from submissions by over 300 society members.
“The rain was coming down through the studio and the dog was sitting on the mat and I was sort of in despair,” she says now with a laugh looking back on it. “Thinking, this is the unglamorous side of being a working artist. And that’s what the painting is about - everything is floating away from me.”
She explains that there’s no visual reference for the introspective composition. The painting, which shows her furniture drifting off to a country road to an exterior landscape and lights in the distance, is completed with some pastel drawing, and gold watercolour pigment, which in the artist’s words “lifts the darkness”.

 

The freeness apparent the artwork is no doubt informed by her approach. She doesn’t have a set plan before laying brush to canvas, nor sketched outlines.
“It develops itself, it has its own inherent logic. I started out painting the dog and the mat and the table, and the rest came when I was using the materials, and putting the ink and the watercolours on and the shapes started dictating the rest of the painting.”
She agrees that Luna and the Flood is a very unusual example of a watercolour painting.

“They [the judges] said themselves that it was an unusual choice – that it was a contemporary take on watercolour painting. Watercolour painting can often have that reputation for being used for landscape and botanical painting only, and it doesn’t deal with bigger subjects. Whereas I use it for the same subjects as I use my oil paintings, so I’ll use it for Aleppo paintings or the darker paintings that I do.”
The Celt hesitantly confesses to prefer other watercolours by Michelle in the exhibition over the winning composition Luna and the Flood, namely two depicting child victims of the Aleppo conflict. Asked if she would agree with the judge’s decision on picking ‘Luna’ over the Aleppo paintings, she mulls over the question.

Unusual
“I think you’re right when you say the portraits – I think the portraits are more of an obvious choice. They [the judges] were obviously seeing something in the bigger painting, and other artists at the exhibition also came up and chose the Luna painting as well. I think because it’s unusual, and it’s quite a raw painting, and quite an immediate painting. The other is more thought out, controlled I suppose.
“That’s what they chose, and Dr Pat McCabe did mention to me that she chose it because it was a very 21st Century painting.”
While it has a very modern vibe, the perspective used for the furniture is reminiscent of Van Gogh’s quirky interior ‘The Bedroom’, a painting from 1889. The Celt’s eager to stress, she’s clearly able to convey perspective exactly, if she wished, and her laugh suggests she’s not offended.
“I think that comes from being self taught,” surmises Michelle, recalling that many of her images use the same device. “Perspective never really matters to me. It’s not that I can’t paint the bed and the table in proper perspective. I’m just not interested in painting like that. I think it’s much more effective to see the table from the top – it makes sense to me to paint like that. I’m not trying to copy anybody by doing it, it’s just the way I paint. I think it has more impact; if you were looking at the table from the side, it wouldn’t be the same.
“I feel when I’m doing those paintings, I’m almost flying over them – I’m almost seeing them from above and that makes sense in my head.”
Like an out of body experience?
“I think that that’s it.”
‘Luna and the Flood’ sold on the opening day of the exhibition, but it will continue to be displayed in Dublin’s Farmleigh Gallery as part of the exhibition until Sunday, October 13. The exhibition also gives viewers the chance to see her incredible Aleppo portraits.

 

“I called them Aleppo 69 and Aleppo 70 because 70 people were killed in the bombing. Like any conflict in any part of the world you often don’t get the faces of people, so those faces were taken from newspaper images.”
Michelle Boyle started painting watercolours about five years ago, finding them much more suited to painting when travelling in Portugal and India.
Previous members of the WCSI include the likes of William Orpen, Percy French, Jack B Yeats and Sarah Purser. She is honoured to be a member of society with such illustrious names going back over a century.

History
“It’s great that the award is given by a panel of artists, so you are getting that affirmation from other artists who you respect, and from an organisation with a very long history,” she says. 
She notes that it’s also reassuring for those who have bought her work in the past. However, she’s reluctant to rest on her laurels.
“Tomorrow I’ll stand in front of another page, or I’ll go out to the forest or start on another project – you always start back at zero. The day you become confident in work, is the day that you lose something. Because I think your work should always challenge you, and encourage you.”