Everard Longland
Water-colourist
Added by Pat Marsden
Everard Longland read Modern Languages at university and taught at Colchester Royal Grammar School for many years, but he always wanted to spend more time painting. He was able to do this during a sabbatical year in Santa Barbara, California in the early 1990s and has not looked back since. He has held a number of exhibitions and his work is in private collections wherever he has travelled.
The artist lives and paints in Wivenhoe, but spends part of each year in Southern California where the light influences his choice of colour. He is a water-colourist, painting mainly botanical subjects, but always with a hint of abstraction and experiment; flowers are paramount. He enjoys the fact that the medium is unforgiving and you have to coax it along until you find a satisfactory image.
He says of his flower paintings:
“It almost seems an affront to paint flowers; to try to represent such perfect forms and colour; yet it would be a shame to avoid some recollection of their visual impact. In this vein, I attempt the delicacies of floral art through shape, pattern, tone, line, association and discovery; not avoiding the botanical but neither being a slave to natural forms, since illusion is the painter’s tool. Watercolour lends itself to the translucency of petals; and its stubborn unwillingness to follow the brush always adds that dynamic magic which is the essence of a flower.”
[This is an updated version of a summary which first appeared in the Wivenhoe Encyclopaedia reproduced here by kind permission of Everard Longland]
Everard Longland can be contacted at:
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