The invitation from Winsor & Newton to come and paint in their West London studio and try out their new watercolor and gouache paints came as a big surprise. I hadn’t applied for the month-long residency and I wasn’t sure if I could afford taking a month away from my own studio work and my job as a decorative painter.
With Winsor and Newton’s generosity, I was able to make the trip and have an experience that I would not have wanted to pass up. In fact, it was the perfect segue between the invented landscapes I make of the Hudson River and George Washington Bridge in New York City, and what I might find by being in another city where a river, the Thames with its many bridges and moody skies, cuts through London’s ancient urban center.
Manhattan has always been a kind of muse for me. Walking in New York is a pastime, a research tool, and a way of life, allowing me time to think and find space to explore ideas, and to dream. The rivers that surround the island of Manhattan create a place like no other.
It means a lot to me to live in New York, especially as I grew up in another river city, St. Louis. Rivers are an internal compass for my artmaking.
For the residency, I needed to have a simple and direct way of thinking about painting London and what I wanted to accomplish over the four weeks that I was to have a large studio to work in. I began at home by looking at photos of London’s cityscape and exploring ideas and images of London through photographs and paintings. I ventured into the past and looked for anything I could find on Monet’s time spent painting Waterloo Bridge from the Savoy Hotel. Diving deep into the Internet, I found out what Monet may have felt about Turner’s work, and what some of Monet’s public thought of his atmospheric canvases. I was completely intrigued.
What I wanted from the residency was to keep my process open, experimental, research-oriented, and free from any constraints. I wanted to allow my color and the materials to take over and expand as much as possible. This was the feeling and connection I wanted to make in the studio during the workweek while experiencing London on foot during the weekends when the studio was not accessible. I did not want the New York landscape in my mind to be stenciled over or embedded under the London scene. I wanted to see something new.
My hope for the residency has been borne out as I brought home not only experimental paintings I made, along with studies of the vibrancy and light of the city, but also reconnected with longtime friends, made new friends, had great conversations, walked and walked through the streets and over the bridges with my husband, Philip. We saw art, began to understand England’s deep connection to Constable, and saw the magic that Britain and London, with their “history around every corner,” played out in real-time.
Being back in New York after such an experience has helped me to see my own neighborhood and haunts in a fresh way. I find that in writing this sketch I’ve readily recalled my walk to the London studio by meandering short cuts up streets with brightly painted houses, by “considerate constructors” working on grand facades, through a mews, past homegrown gardens, tiny houses, gray skies on the edge of rain and also made the experience my own again, as it should be.
Interview with Winsor & Newton • Spotlight on Kyle Gallup 2021
