Paul Moran

I started watercolour painting only about four years ago in England, where I took up this simple and beautiful medium to capture the light effects over the landscape. This hobby was to become a consuming desire to capture light, skies and largely emptiness through wet-in-wet techniques. I was very happy with some of the results of this exploration and built up a collection, continuing until coming to work in Egypt over two years ago. I still have taken no formal art classes but cannot claim to be entirely self-taught as I love to learn from reading some of the excellent watercolour books now on offer. My favourite is Ron Ranson's on Edward Seago. Whatever my painting takes me, I cannot be grateful enough for being able to start out with such great artists' work and tips leading the way. I think my watercolours for these few years were characterised by a feel for light, air and water, with little imposing clutter and lots of space: www.paulmorangallery.com/eng.html

On coming to Egypt anyone is struck by the amazing bleaching light striking down on the landscape and creating remarkably different effects. This discovery was very inspiring, leading to more wet-in-wet study and an obsession about how to capture this feeling on paper. It is quite gratifying for people to buy one's paintings and soon after displaying the Egyptian-based works to colleagues and friends they began to sell. They are being built into a collection at this moment and currently I am introducing figures into landscapes where needed, as in the work below right, a scene from Khan-al-Khalili, the great medieval market in Cairo.

Egypt has its own charactistics for the plein-air painter, notably a lack of peace-and-quiet in many areas necessary for any outdoors work, so reliance here on photography and learning to compose scenes and capture on camera details around the city in order to construct a successful watercolour are essential. Becoming a thnking photographer has taught me lots about composition, line, contrasts and I think the 'wide-angled' and lens-effect nature of some of my finished paintings are symptomatic of this. I personally find this modern touch quite a nice spin on traditional compositions and see no need to correct or change anything in this respect. The scene from the Marriot Hotel on the Nile above illustrates this stylistic motif well. www.paulmorangallery.com/egy.html

Although I only took up painting just over four years ago, as a youngster I studied anatomy and loved to draw the human form, inspired largely by the inking skills of comic book artists. This summer, 2008, I thought I might attempt something different and produced Back Study 1, below, as a quick watercolour sketch. I then went on to experiment with wet-on-wet and dry-brush techniques in an attempt to convey simple emotion in the skin-tones, sense of weight, mass and form;- all of those challenges which confront any figure painter, except that it is usually thought that watercolour paints are not suited to this subject. I hope to prove this idea wrong and, in my own small way do a little to help establish watercolour as an ideal medium for portraying the easy grace and beauty of the human form- at this stage the female form. Proportion and form are central to the approach shown in these paintings- if the pencil work looks somehow wrong then paint won't be applied. Then usually within two hours (sometimes a lot quicker), a flurry of wet-in-wet and dry work produces the end result. This part is the most difficult to describe as there is no time or space to reflect on what you are actually doing and why, it just happens. So I won't try. I hope you like these works and enjoy browsing my gallery.

Paul
pmoran@yours.com