Alexandra Blum, ‘Green Mantle, watercolour on paper, 23 x 30.5 cm, 2025. Exhibited in ‘Landscape Open 2025’, Salisbury Museum.
It’s early May 2025 and I continued to observe the urban forest leading up to Shooters Hill in Charlton, from my fifth-floor studio window. The range of colours within the view keeps changing, and seems to make significant shifts every few weeks. One of my aims is for the range of colour within each image to emerge in response to the observations I make of this small area of London over the 3-4 weeks during which I work on each watercolour (rather than planning the colour relationships in advance).
Whilst I was making this image the tree canopy kept expanding and felt as if it had the potential to reclaim the city and engulf the buildings under construction. The red bus travelling through the image also became an important element. I've travelled by bus along that route many times and the bus in the image seemed to reflect my experience of feeling as if the bus were a sealed unit travelling through, and separate from, the surrounding abundance of life which seemed to expand in every direction. Paradoxically, the image was also informed by the experience of being enveloped in green light when standing under a huge plane tree in full leaf.
I also enjoyed using colour in a variety of ways across the image: sometimes recreating the range of greens amongst the leaves as closely as possible, at other times making intuitive colour equivalents of the tone I saw as the light changed, at other times using pure colour to construct spatial connections between distant areas of the image.