About the London Watercolour series

I paint, as Ken Howard has remarked, "because it's what you do - you can't help it". I also paint because, as he says it is "celebrating, revealing and communicating" something to others.

It is quite easy to get bogged down thinking about "style" or the comings and goings of fashion. Perhaps, if one has to be fashionable, one hasn't got much else to say, since fashions are by definition, transient effects and I'm not really bothered about that aspect of artform. I am most content being myself, with pen, pencil or brush doing what interests and moves me. Working "plein air", as David Curtis has remarked, "is not much in vogue these days", but it is essential, if a painter seeks to find soul in a subject, to work with and from it, and that's what I sincerely try to do, however hard it may be.

Recently I went to the David Cox anniversary exhibition in Birmingham. It was a revelation and he was among the leaders in painting directly from nature. It is working like this, from nature, that you somehow feel the spirit of former souls who have been there before you and left their mark.

I like that.

More about Bob Henfrey

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