Prima Materia

My very first watercolour, and the root of everything since: thousands of colour dots, each one dropped by hand.

A colourful abstract watercolour, set down as an archival fine art print.

I called it Prima Materia, first matter, and the name turned out truer than I meant it: it became the first matter of everything I have made since. The technique began here, the colours began here, and I have never stopped, there is always one of these going somewhere, on my wall or in a drawer, always in different colours.

It is built from thousands of dots, each placed by hand, the whole field of them on an original just 15 centimetres square. I drop a bubble of clean water, let pigment into it, then pull some back out with a tissue or leave it to dry on its own, and it dries differently every time. I decide how big the bubble is and where its edge falls, but not what the colour does inside it, and that is the whole point: I hold the edges and let go of the middle. A river of bare paper winds through the field where I left the paper to breathe.

What it gives you is the concentration that went into it. No one needs to be told how much time and attention thousands of hand-dropped dots take; you feel it in front of the painting, and it slows you to meet it. It is a surface that asks for your attention and gives it back. It is the flow itself.

It surfaces all over the shop. The panel marked O Nata Lux inside Invictus is one of these; so are the dot fields in Green Cabinet; Spoor is painted in the same language; even the rose at the heart of Green Lush carries these colours. Not as hidden references, but because art is interlaced in my mind, so it has to be interlaced on paper.

Of everything I make, this is the one that most plainly does the thing the rest of the shop is built for. It is slow looking, made visible.

Printed to order on Hahnemühle German Etching, a heavyweight 310gsm mould-made fine art paper, acid- and lignin-free to museum standard, with archival pigment inks. A giclée from an original watercolour by Léna Ruisz, never a mass reproduction, colour-managed to stay true to the original painting. Because every screen shows colour a little differently, what you see on your device may vary slightly from the finished print. Free worldwide shipping, arriving ready to live with. No frame is forced on you, so choose the size that fits your wall.

You are buying the fine art print only. The frame shown in the product image, and any mount, furniture, plants or other props in the photographs, are there to show scale and setting. They are not included in your purchase.