Pheasants 1918

Archibald Thorburn made this watercolour painting of pheasants sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century; look at how he’s built up these incredibly detailed images out of what are actually really loose washes of colour. You can see the liquid flow of the medium right there in the finished image. Watercolour can be a really unforgiving medium, but what I love here is how the surface has a kind of scrappy, unfinished quality. There's a tension between the incredibly detailed rendering of the birds' plumage and the almost accidental splatters and dribbles in the background. It’s not about the finished product; it’s about the traces of the process. Take a look at the grass in the foreground, a few quick strokes of brown and ochre, barely anything there, but it totally works. This reminds me a little of some of Dürer's watercolour studies, that same attention to detail combined with a kind of scientific curiosity. It shows how observation, perception, and mark-making come together to create something that’s beautiful but also strange.