- Callum Innes (b. 1962) is a Turner Prize nominee and one of the most
significant abstract painters of his generation - a pure land features
50 new watercolors, which Innes completed in his Oslo studio during
lockdown, in 2020 - Introduced with a poem by Thomas A Clark (b. 1944) -
a pure land - from which the book takes its inspiration and its title -
The book is published to coincide with an exhibition at OSL
Contemporary, in Oslo, in February 2021, and then i8 Gallery, in
Reykjavik, in April 2021 Callum Innes is one of the few artists working
in abstraction to include watercolour as a major part of his practice.
As with many painters, his explorations in this medium form a parallel
body of work, an activity taken on as a kind of 'break' from his other
painting, with different circumstances, conditions and intentions. Innes
has been making watercolours for more than 25 years. He began to explore
the medium when he was asked to do a show at the Kunsthaus, in Zurich.
He says: "I blithely said yes to an exhibition without ever having made
a watercolour before. It caused a lot of stress at the time, but I
gradually developed a way of working with paper and pigment. I am still
making watercolours, although they have changed over the years, and now
I realise that they inform the oil paintings more and more. When you
place two pigments together, either opposite or complementary, and then
dissolve them in water you achieve a completely new colour which only
reveals itself on the paper. I am often surprised and disappointed in
the same hour. "It has been a couple of years since I last spent time
with watercolours. When lockdown occurred, in March 2020, I was setting
up a new studio, overlooking a fjord in Oslo. It was unfamiliar, and I
had no reference to earlier works as I do in Edinburgh. I started to
work on a new watercolour series, focusing on them for a week at a time,
always starting the day with a black and white one, just to get my hand
in ... the black and white ones are the most elusive. "This new body of
50 watercolours feels stronger and more luminous than previous ones. I
have kept them sequential in the book, to show how each work informs the
next and so on."
