Entrance to the Radićeva Street ("City Guard", "Turkish Tower") 1997

Alfred Freddy Krupa made this watercolour painting of the Entrance to the Radićeva Street. You can see in the way the light is caught in this little vignette, that Krupa enjoys working with a wet-on-wet technique. It's interesting how the paint bleeds and merges, suggesting forms more than defining them. Look at the tree on the right – the trunk is created from a series of dark washes with the watery pigment allowed to find its own level. This sense of the material having its own agency is really central to watercolour painting. It's such a fluid medium, quite unlike oil or acrylic which can be pushed around the canvas more readily. Turner comes to mind with his atmospheric landscapes, or maybe even some of the more ethereal works of Georgia O'Keefe. But there's something very contemporary about the way the painting embraces its own inherent ambiguity.