‘Practicum on an Idealised Landscape’ is a recent look at landscape. Thinking about different greens in watercolour, that whole watercolour landscape tradition and the nostalgic country names that are given to commercial green paints. My father was a watercolourist, who trained at Winchester School of Art just after WWII and exhibited with the South Wales Arts Society. He and my mother now live in a garden village, the idealised movement that flowered with Utopian Socialism and the Arts & Crafts movement. The village they live in has strict rules, due to Grade2 listing, about what can and can’t be done to the fabric of the buildings, including carefully prescribed colours of house paint. On a recent visit in September 2010 I documented the different greens on the garage doors as people do what they want while nodding in direction of these rules. The result is an artist book presented in the form of a slideshow '60 shades of green' that is presented with a poem I have been writing about Actaeon and the forest: our green youth when we enter the forest and look upon the embodiment of Love. The subjects of the work, artist book and poem, are therefore not just idealised landscape and the mythos of Youth, but also by inference ageing, which has come in this instance from thinking about my father as he was, and is.
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