Catherine Barnes returns to the classical approach for Chichester art show

It’s a notion that informs her latest exhibition at Chichester’s Oxmarket Contemporary. Water, water runs on January 12, 13,14, January 19, 20, 21 and January 26, 27, 28, open 10-4.30pm.

“It just means that the artist feels emotion. Whatever is visual, there is also emotion which also embraces the visual. If I'm looking at a puddle then I am trying to portray the feeling that I have got from looking at that puddle and not just portray the puddle. I'm trying to give that feeling so that other people can feel it as well but equally it doesn't have to be exactly the same feeling. It can be a different visual language. There is plenty of room for all of us in my puddle!”

As for the title of the exhibition it comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.”

“Everybody knows that line but just before he writes ‘As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean.’ and I just thought yes but I don't have any ships! But I've got oceans and I've got streams. I've got 24 seascapes and 16 local river and stream scenes and stagnant waters. The stagnant waters are important because if you don't have the stagnant waters you don't get the reflections. I've gone to the college grounds and I've gone to the Parkland wetlands. There's also the River Lavant which comes and goes and it roars in the winter when you don't want it to and then in the summer when you want it to roar it just becomes a little trickle. But both sides are very intriguing and obviously you don't get the complex reflections if it is racing all the time. There is a patch of stagnant water by the multi-storey car park on the way to the station and you get very complex reflections in that. You get the red colours from the red brick of the multi-storey car park and the yellows from underneath the bridge. It is fascinating.”

Inevitably water is one of the great challenges for an artist: “It moves and you really have to think about that and you have to think whether it is light or whether it is dark to start with. You can't paint unless you've got dark first. Once you've got the dark then you can put the light on top of it and it becomes almost a subject. That's the way I do it. Or you can take a photo. I sometimes take photos if it is about to rain on my sketchbook. The only thing you can't do is drawing when it's raining. It is just no good.”

The exhibition features work from the last couple of years: “I work all the time and I think the pandemic really helped me in that sense. I have my studio. I didn't have anything else to do. You couldn't go out. You couldn’t go and see anybody. You could just go for a little walk sometimes and it was good for concentration and it also inspired me to stop messing about and experimenting. There was a reason to return to the classic approach of look at it and see it and think about it and put it down. Instead of making something perhaps more abstract I really got back to the classical approach to making art and I was in good company. If you look, you can see that Picasso and others did that after the war. They went back to a more figurative approach to their work.”