Making art always contains risk. Anything the hand does in making a painting is subject to slippage. Even that most laborious and derided business of tracing a drawing onto paper to fill it in might involve a slip, a smudge, an incoherent line. People talk about improvisation and invention and happy accidents and deliberate mistakes when they talk about painting, and what they’re talking about is this gap between eye, hand and materials.
There’s a lot that can go wrong. Some artists work as if it’s always going right, and the painter just hasn’t realised it yet. Others walk on a tightrope of decisions, holding their breath and hoping not to wobble.
For their annual Autumn exhibition, artists of the Royal Watercolour Society (RWS) will explore the theme of 'Risk' with a fantastic selection of new paintings.
