Feature: Exhibition - The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition at Mall Galleries
Published: 8 September, 2011
by SIMON WROE
WHILE most watercolour artists look to the landscape for their inspiration, Philip Ciolina is different. He turns his backs to the mountains and paints a flower or a still life or an interior.
After 30 years living and working in Camden – first in Parliament Hill and later in Kentish Town – Ciolina moved his work to the Kentish coast and a small studio in the Pyrenees.
He returns to London next week for two exhibitions featuring his work: The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition at the Mall Galleries in Westminster, for which he has been shortlisted, and the Still Lives and Interiors show at Kensington’s Thackeray Gallery.
Two of Ciolina’s rose paintings, the shortlisted entries, were influenced by fragments of poetry from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets.
“I don’t illustrate poems,” explains Ciolina, who has nurtured an interest in poetry since he attended a reading at Keats House in the 1980s.
“For me words in poems are like the colours on a palette for a painter. I think painters and poets are the same – they have a big reservoir of images to draw on.”
• The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition is at the Mall Galleries, SW1, from September
12-18. Admission free. Still Lives and Interiors is at the Thackeray Gallery, W8, from September 13-30