I am Léna Ruisz, a maximalist watercolour painter, and I work small, by hand, here in Basel. What I really do, all of the time, is watch and observe – the feelings, the textures and the colours moving around me – and then I put them down on paper as memories, or as little narratives. Mostly in watercolour, though more and more I find myself reaching for coloured pencil, oil pastel and artist-grade gouache as well. But before you look at anything I have made, there is one thing worth knowing about me, and it runs through every single piece: I am fascinated by detail, in every possible sense of the word.
A detail in nature can hold me for a whole afternoon – the crisp edge of a bee's wing, the impossible way nature layers colour and texture onto the body of a leaf insect, or a single frostbitten spot on a grape leaf in early autumn. And a detail in a life can stop me just as completely, though those are the ones you only catch if you slow right down and pay real attention: a turn in a conversation, a gut-feeling, a glimpse, the small decision that quietly changes everything afterwards. My paintings are made of both kinds of detail at once, which is why, if you look into a Cabinet of Small Worlds or one of the Small Narratives, almost every leaf and object and figure is carrying something with it – a memory, an understanding, a narrative left unspoken.
A spiderweb of meaning
Almost nothing in Wildcabinet stands alone, because art is interlaced in my mind, and so it has to be interlaced on paper too – every piece I make shares a kind of spiderweb of meaning with all the others. I love to hide one painting inside another, and to tuck references right across the whole collection, some of them in plain sight and some of them kept secret, until it becomes a game I play with myself, with my nephews, and with anyone willing to look long enough to start finding them. It is the part I love most, and it is the part that is never finished, because the web only ever grows – one day it will be genuinely hard to navigate, even for me, and that is exactly where I want it to go, for the rest of my life.
Maximalist watercolour: colour is the subject
All of this reaches the paper through one channel above all others: colour, and the pigment it is made of.
I have been in love with colour since I was a very small child, and I think it is because, for me, colour was never something separate from sound. I grew up inside music – I am a trained musician – and somewhere very early the two senses simply fused, so that to this day colours are sound to me, sound has a texture, and only on paper does the whole thing finally make complete sense. The white of the page, for instance, works exactly the way a pause works in a piece of music: the same silence, used for the very same reason. As a child I already organised everything I owned by colour, and I collected anything that carried real saturation in it, because I had understood, long before I could explain it, just how much sheer power a single colour holds – how a loud one will pull your eye straight to the detail that matters, while a quiet one can hide something every bit as important in plain sight.
Watercolour is the one medium that hands me both of those extremes at once. There is the faint, dreamlike whisper of it, pigment drifting and blooming and mixing in a puddle entirely of its own accord, and then there is the densest, most saturated, almost shameless look-at-me a colour can be made to do. Most people who see my work do not believe it is watercolour at all, simply because watercolour is so rarely pushed this far, and that pushing is really what maximalist watercolour means for me: taking the most delicate medium there is and asking it to be as loud, and as deep, as oil or gouache, without it ever forgetting it was born from water. To work this way, though, you do need the very best materials there are, and over the years I have had the real privilege of gathering a great many of them – more, by now, than most painters will ever assemble, and some of it genuinely rare even at this level.
My Wildcabinet Library of Colours and Pigments is approaching a thousand swatches now – a swatch being a small hand-painted sample of a single colour, so that I know exactly how each one behaves long before it ever touches a real painting. The library holds the full Winsor & Newton range, the entire Sennelier line, which remains my absolute favourite, all of Schmincke Horadam in both watercolour and gouache, the beautiful handmade pans from the small Polish manufacture Renesans, every Caran d'Ache Luminance and Museum Aquarelle pencil, and the whole Faber-Castell Polychromos set. I keep a genuinely scientific and historical interest in the pigments themselves – in what each one actually is, where it comes from, and how it moves through water. I have never studied visual art in any academy, and that side of me has always stayed empirical and observational, learned entirely by hand since I was a child. I trained one art form all the way to the very top, and that was music, but I have always loved that the other one was allowed to stay completely free.
Miniature watercolours, painted by hand in Basel
I work in a corner of my studio here in Basel that is, honestly, almost embarrassingly comfortable. Because nothing I paint is ever larger than thirty centimetres, I have never needed much room at all – only a chair with a warm blanket thrown over it, a heated one in winter, which is the real luxury of luxuries, and my daylight lamp lighting up the whole little corner. On the wall beside me there is always a row of unfinished works, taped up where I cannot help but see them, and the oldest of them has now been hanging there for nearly four years. That is completely fine. Its time will come. When my attention shifts, a painting is never thrown away, it simply goes to sleep for a while, waiting to be woken again when it is finally ready – Invictus for example waited exactly like that.
On the table itself is whatever I happen to be painting at that moment, my mechanical pencil always within reach, and two or three jugs of water sitting on a folded paper towel – blue always having its own jug, as it will muddy everything else within seconds. There are a few brushes – classic Kolinsky ones up to a size 6, which are precious, expensive things, alongside a couple of wonderful, very cheap synthetic ones – and a working palette of fifty-five colours that I chose with enormous care, even though the honest truth is that I really only use ten or fifteen of them, with all the rest waiting there for their special moment. And then I begin to paint, and the world finally, gratefully, goes quiet.
The instant the brush touches the pigment, some part of the control quietly leaves my hands, and that is exactly the point of it. The colour flickers and spreads and swirls through the water differently every single time, depending entirely on what it is made of, and the paper itself keeps changing the rules underneath – cold pressed behaves nothing like hot pressed, one brand nothing like the next – so each session becomes its own act of close observation and constant adaptation. That kind of distilled, total concentration is not something unique to painting for me. It is the very same concentration I have been trained in since I was a tiny child at the violin, the same discipline a piece of music demands, which is probably why the two have always felt, at their very core, like one and the same act.
A life that fits inside a sketchbook
I am also a violinist, which means a good part of my life is spent on tour, and the painting simply comes with me wherever I go. Away from the studio it stops feeling like a habit and starts feeling far more like gravity, because I genuinely cannot leave a piece alone. I have painted in hotel rooms and in parks, in coffee shops and on the sand, and in fact most of Green Cabinet was finished in Barcelona, in February, barefoot, sitting right next to the sea. I am also lucky enough to spend real time up in the high mountains of Switzerland and Austria, where the inspiration tends to arrive directly, straight from the source, which usually means you would find me sweating and filthy in the middle of a field, or wedged into the fork of a tree with my sketchbook, lying flat on the ground to study the petal-thickness of some rare alpine flower I have only just seen for the first time in my life, while my dog and my partner wait beside me, perfectly patiently, enjoying the view. That sketchbook goes absolutely everywhere with me. It is my no-judgement zone, the place where I am slowly teaching myself not to be a perfectionist, but simply to catch whatever happens to be worth keeping.
No rules, because I never learned them
Most of what I make is completely unplanned, because I almost never decide on a painting in advance. I simply keep all of my materials spread out in front of me – the paints, the pencils, the gouache – and then I follow the colour wherever it chooses to go. Nothing that could really be called a mistake is able to happen this way, for the simple reason that there is no expected outcome sitting there to fail against. For a whole decade I painted entirely for myself, to please absolutely no one, and I almost never judged the result, and while Wildcabinet changes that a little now, the core of it does not change at all. What ends up on the paper is, quite simply, all of me: an honest channel, running straight from a memory, or a feeling, or something I once watched very closely.
People sometimes ask me what it is that makes a painting unmistakably mine, and I think it is partly the saturation, pushed somewhere watercolour was never really meant to go, and partly the precision, and partly the deep black ground I set behind the colour so that it can finally detonate against it. But underneath all of that, the real answer is the connectedness – the fact that everything comes from the same single place inside me, and links back to everything else I have ever made, right the way back to the very first painting.
Learning to look
The single hardest thing I have ever done with a brush is Apis fratris ♂ – the bee. It was never that I doubted such a thing was possible – I simply never believed that I could be the one to do it, with that much detail, that close to nature herself. It turned out that I could, given the right motivation. I am training to become a beekeeper up in the mountains, and my fascination with these creatures is simply what led me to paint them. I went in with no sketches at all – just ten quiet minutes at the hive, watching, then back to the table and into the paint, and back and forth like that across a few days. And out of that one single bee, every other small creature I had been observing for so long began, somehow, to look back at me, and I understood that I had finally found a way to truly look.
It has opened up a whole new direction for me, and it is one I fully intend to follow from here on. Through this one painting I fell completely into the rich, old tradition of natural-history illustration, and I want to give a real part of my life to it now, following very humbly in the long line of naturalist-painters who looked this closely long before me. Maria Sibylla Merian most of all, whose family was Basel's own and whose portrait still hangs in the Kunstmuseum here in my own city, but also the great observers who came alongside and after her – from Ernst Haeckel's impossible natural forms to the botanical painters who gave a single flower the same reverence most people keep only for a face.
In the end, it really is very simple. Colour is the cement that runs through absolutely everything I do – the music, the painting, the time I spend out working in nature – and painting is simply the way I make all of it last. So when you come closer to one of these pictures, that is exactly what you are looking at: a detail I could not bear to let pass me by, kept on paper in the most vivid, and the most secret, way I know.
Come closer. Every piece here exists as an original watercolour, and as an archival fine art print on Hahnemühle German Etching 310gsm, so you can live with the detail yourself. Step into the four Cabinets of Small Worlds, the year-long diaries where the spiderweb lives. Read the Small Narratives, the feelings I had no words for. Meet the Specimens, where I learned to look. Or sit with colour alone in Materia.