Part 38 of an interview series in which artists reply to the same six questions. Helen Reynolds is a New Zealand artist whose work in many media explores systems, layers, and translucency. Her recent watercolour pieces push the boundaries of what we normally expect of that medium, often emerging as large-scale abstract pieces that focus on a single gesture carried as far as it can go. Her website is here. Other interviews on this blog are available here.
Philip Hartigan: What medium/media do you chiefly use, and why?
Helen Reynolds: I’ve been working almost entirely in watercolour for five years now. Watercolour is translucent, treacherous and delicate - I love it.
I started using watercolours when my daughter was quite ill and I was spending most of my day looking after her. Watercolour fits into women’s lives when those lives are constrained to the domestic. You can put watercolour down quickly, it doesn’t smell, make a mess and ruin your brushes. Now my daughter is well again, I love experimenting with using this ‘women’s’ medium - so often used in a mild and traditional way - and pushing it out into bold, brave, strong shapes.
PH: What piece are you currently working on?
HR: I’m still exhausted from covid - and covid has also interrupted supplies of watercolour paper into New Zealand. The long supply chain from the European paper mills to this side of the world is a bit fragmented. So I am making my turning lines in Indian ink on drawing paper. It’s really different from watercolour - immediate and definite. I don’t have to work hard to get a feeling of strength. It’s just automatically part of this black/white, ink/paper thing.
A recent commission asked me to be more deliberate in my colour choices, which I found difficult at first, but now I really want to make singing, clear colours all the time - just waiting for the paper to be shipped in!
PH: What creative surprises are happening in the current work?
HR: With watercolour, its always got surprise built in! The pigments flow with the water and end up where the water takes them - not where I intend them to go. I make this surprise part of the process by building up layers that emphasis the way colour emerges from the process.
PH: What other artistic medium (or non-artistic activity) feeds your creative process?
HR: I love gardening - which led me to studying landscape architecture a while ago- and inspires me to work with systems. In the landscape, the systems of plant’s needs for sunlight combined with a need to reproduce create this infinite beauty around us. So I try and let the processes and systems take over my art, let them have creative control.
The other big thing for me is yoga. To paint the way I paint, I need to have both focus and physical mobility. My studio days start with yoga followed by painting in ink on paper, just practicing over and over. In my pyjamas.
PH: What's the first ever piece of art you remember making?
HR: I so vividly remember what felt like a huge explosion and opening up for me at Kindergarten. I painted a strong red line and I knew I had changed the world a little bit. I remember the feeling of having created something stimulating and rich visually and also at the same time creating a representation of a path, a journey. I remember putting a series of blue brush marks next to the red line, the sort of mark where the splayed brush shape pushed into the paper looks like foot prints and being so happy that these ‘foot prints’ boosted the ‘path’ story of the red line.
PH: Finally, and you can answer this in any way that's meaningful to you: why are you an artist?
HR: At first I was an artist because I loved the feeling -a feeling which to me is almost literal - of reaching up into a universe of infinite possibility (a universe of things that exist only in some future/alternative reality) and pulling down a new idea, and create that idea in this reality. In a way, that is kind of mind blowing enough and fun enough for one lifetime! That was enough for me for many years. But my art fairly suddenly moved into a more productive space when I went beyond thinking of art as something wonderfully fun and exciting I did.
I started to realise art is work . Real work that the world needs and I had to get into the studio and make art well, make lots of it, and make sure it got out into the world. Because I now think of art as the act of transmitting one person’s experience to another person (through visual means, through the eyes). So if I could learn to generate meaningful, important states of experience within myself, and then learn to intensify how these states are communicated visually, that’s work that needs doing. I need to do it not just when it feels fun, but I need to do the work when I feel a bit lazy, I need to do it when I am confused about everything, when I am worried and when I am happy.
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