142nd Annual Exhibition review — Inflexible tradition and supple fluidity

The Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour is one of a trio of Edinburgh-based august exhibiting societies formed in the Victorian era and it is, perhaps, the most conservative of the three in terms of its membership, exhibiting policy and outreach.

If you like art that consists of wall-mounted, framed, largely representational images of landscape, still-life, occasional portraiture, sea-scape and objets trouvés etc, this is the show for you. The show is termed an open exhibition, although the vast majority of the 300-plus works are by the society’s membership.

If all that sounds rather dispiriting, there are alleviating factors, not least the dedicated professionalism of most of the entries. If sheer technical acuity were the only criterion by which to judge the show, it would be a knock-out.

As it stands,though, you will struggle here to find engagement with any of the pressing issues (political, racial, environmental) of our complex world. It is as if these artists have inhabited their own worlds, sheltered and insulated from what goes on elsewhere. But perhaps that is the point: the pursuit of art for art’s sake is both antidote and counterpoint.

What’s wrong with colour, beauty, composition and technical expertise you may ask? Nothing, except that when it prevails at the cost of everything else, something seems amiss.

Curiously, two of the stand-out pieces for me were not conspicuously composed of the medium (now, apparently, extended to water-based paint, so gouache and acrylic) the society claims as its raison d’être. One is a floor-based work, an installation by Janet Melrose titled Groundsheet, which extends to the adjacent wall. It’s a narrative work, and quite possibly autobiographical as well in the sense that there is a melancholy intimacy to the piece, which has at its centre an image of a girl’s dress.

In 2019, Emma Blackhall deservedly won the society’s Alexander Munro travel award. The artist went to Mexico, and one result of her sojourn is the remarkable Hologram Papa dedicated to William Sievwright 1937-2022, her grandfather, in what appears to be a construction of layered paper and ink. It’s haunting, powerful and full of resonances.

Among work in more traditional media are paintings by stalwarts such as Marian Leven and Angus McEwan, and the relative newcomers Liz Myhill and Pascale Rentsch, all demonstrating, in their different ways, the great strengths and attractions of the fluidity and suppleness of the watercolour medium.