Poul Webb

The rhythm of crop patterns in southern climates has provided a powerful motif for Poul Webb since he first found inspiration in the tobacco fields of Cuba’s Vinales Valley. Now, some fifteen years (and six exhibitions) on, in Indian’s southern state of Kerala, on the Arabian Sea, it is the patterns imposed by tea cultivation in the Nilgiri hills which, perhaps more intensely than with any earlier subject, have opened new windows, cultural as well as natural, for this most daring and vertiginous of colourists. 

‘In the tea plantations’, comments Webb, ‘which shape the landscape around former colonial hill stations high in the Western Ghats, What were great swathes of equatorial forest, now unfold in endless vistas of undulating green carpet. Laid out in rows to facilitate picking, the tea plants form layers around the steep contours of the landscape, sometimes at a precipitous forty-five degree angle. A sprinkling of silver oak gives plants just enough shade, interrupted by the occasional massive jacaranda with its purple-blue flowers and acacias in brightest crimson against a backdrop of the brilliant green tea camellia alongside tall, spindly eucalyptus.  Rising and falling as they intersect at different levels, dusty red tracks bifurcate, meet and separate again along these steepest hillsides.’

While in strictest landscape terms green (Arundhati Roy’s ‘immodest green’, to be sure) predominates in Kerala, it will be no less of a joy (for not being an entire surprise) to those already familiar with Webb’s work to discover in these paintings a way of interpreting landscape that is also a response to the colours of the subcontinent. ‘Brightly coloured temples swarming with devotional figures,’ notes Webb, ‘ women in their saris in delicate shades of  pink and red, mauve and purple – it was inevitable that the richness of all this colour, though no part of my subject, would translate on to my palette.’

So it is that the exuberant drama of Webb’s approach – playful as ever, as the artist typically oscillates between perspectival depth and semi-abstraction on a two dimensional plane, keeping the viewer’s eye always on the move – becomes  the expression of a more comprehensive response to the full experience of India, a window of heightened perception that has provoked his most dynamic handling of colour and texture to date. ‘It is quite possible’, speculates the psychologist C G Jung, ‘that India is the real world and that the white man lives in a madhouse of abstractions…Life in India has not yet withdrawn into the capsule of the head. It is still the whole body that lives. No wonder the European feels dreamlike: the complete life of India is something of which he merely dreams…’ (C G Jung, The dreamlike world of India, 1939).

Biography

POUL WEBB was born in Cambridge in 1947 and educated at the Cambridge School of Art.  Soon after he graduated his work was exhibited at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition and in 1973 in the British International Drawing Biennale at Bradford.  In the mid 1970s he showed twice in major International Exhibitions of Original Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in Rijeka and work of his was acquired at this time by H.M. Government Art Collection.  In 1987 he was one of Ten British Watercolourists shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Bilbao. 

Since 1990 Poul Webb has worked largely in oils, a development accompanying his preference for a time for subject matter drawn from the Americas.  He has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1978 and in 1979 exhibited his Watercolours of Calabria.  This was followed by Watercolours of Morocco (1981), Watercolours of the Aegean (1984), Watercolours of the Caribbean (1986), Tropical Deco: Paintings of Miami and the Florida Keys (1988), Paintings of New Orleans (1990), In Cuba (1998), On the Weald (2000), In Provence (2002), In Tuscany and California (2004), In the Douro Valley (2006), In Andalucía (2008) and (2010). In 2005 Poul Webb was a major participant in the Gallery’s theme exhibition Lair of The Leopard: twenty artists go in search of Lampedusa’s Sicily (2005) and several of his paintings appear in Lair of The Leopard (Third Millennium Publishing, London, 2006). In 2006 his paintings featured in Everyone Sang: a view of Siegfried Sassoon and Keralahis world by twenty-five painters today. Shades of Grey, Poul Webb’s first collection of poems, was published by The Boho Press, Bristol, 2006

Archive

Andalucia paintings, 2008

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