Three Painters

Product Description

Albert Marquet travelling widely in search of the ultimate harbour; Pierre Bonnard ‘transcribing the adventures of the optic nerve’; Max Beckmann plunging into myth: these are the subjects of Watson’s three manoeuvres. Picasso famously said that Bonnard’s palette was a ‘pot-pourri of indecision’ and that he ‘never used one colour when he could use many’. Watson’s celebration of Bonnard takes this multiplicity as its starting point. In Bonnard ‘the complexity of the visual field’ becomes the complexity of narrative. This variegated sequence is flanked by a suite of poems accompanying Marquet’s repeated travels through France, Europe and Egypt; and by a tour-de-force in which Watson skis down the snow peaks of Beckmann’s world, negotiating a panoply of mermen, mermaids and demi-gods.

“His poems range considerably, from beautifully poised meditations in the manner of Wallace Stevens through to light-hearted satire.”
—Geoff Page

“Wow!… his work is extraordinary.”
—Peter Minter

“An eclectic excursion through the lives of three painters who embody aspects of Watson’s own preoccupations, namely wit, complexity and effortless lyricism.”
—Thomas Crosse

REVIEWS

“Resonating in each part’s distinctiveness are concepts: to visit and revisit, arrival and departure, glimpses and residues, completeness and incompleteness, ‘diverse harbours’, ‘diverging impulses’—complexity. ‘Fragments, interludes, tropes, anecdotes, sketches’ become more than the sum of their parts in this poetry collection…Watson’s poetry and prose poetry is at its best and most inventive when he fully embraces narrative and his painter-subjects as characters—when his philosophy courses between his words with ease.” ASHLEY HAYWOOD, Rochford Street Review