Echoing GreeN II
The Printed Year

Printmaking is reflection, a reversal through time and space. In Verity’s watercolour monotypes there is a further reversal. An image emerges not just from paint added, but from paint taken away: she removes freely washed-on areas of colour by drawing with a brush loaded with water, which brings unusual clarity and exactitude. Finding the edges of things, she gives shape to individual leaves, petals, reflections and thorns.

CV 66, 2020
watercolour monotype, 27.6 x 49.7 cm

CV 37, 2019
watercolour monotype, 32.3 x 41.5 cm

Beauty in itself does not catch her attention: the irises in her garden, for example, have been left out of Echoing Green: ‘One day I’ll paint the irises, but it’s more to do with finding, making something out of a glimpse of something. The glimpse is important to me.’

In her studio, Verity placed in jars the flowers or foliage she had picked and set them on panes of glass, incorporating their reflections into the compositions. This reflection is another ghost, an alternative view, a way of bringing abstraction into the frame. It is untouchable, a spectral double of a physical object, something that shifts a flower from the realm of the observed still-life object into a more metaphysical space.

CV 28, 2020
watercolour monotype, 27.6 x 61.6 cm

While undeniably precise, Verity’s work in this series is the antithesis of botanical painting. That can be precise too, and the result of long, hard looking. But the aim of botanical art is to show with scientific correctness a plant or a flower for the point of record. It occupies a zone apart from time and place. The hand of the artist is visible of course, but the purpose of the work is to explain. The difference with Verity’s painting is her poetic imagination: the lucidity of her mind, as she sees and then represents something that has resonance for her. This is the impetus, the thing that makes her work occupy a different space from botanical art.

CV 39, 2020
watercolour monotype, 40.1 x 33.3 cm

In Echoing Green, each work takes one of Verity’s ‘spots of time’ and transforms it with care and attention into something we can also experience. There are myriad things to see in her neighbourhood. In each one of these prints, there is some sort of luminosity, the light reflected by objects and the light of those unforgettably clear lockdown skies, the brilliance of Verity’s poetry. There is space to draw breath: she is saying, ‘Here, take a look at this. It is worth it.’