Christine Valentini

In her notes Joy wondered why she left the slashes of white to the right of this composition. This is a watercolour of Joy’s very good longtime-friend Christine Valentini. Joy didn’t care for water colour painting much prefering oils, but this was painted as she said in her Wexford School For The Arts days where students gained experience in many media. It is an excellent piece even though the size of the image file is not the best. My suspicion is that the watercolour class  was probably conducted by  Sirpa Christensen, a very skillful instructor who would have directed the saving of white areas as that is how watercolours maintain their brilliance. They do just that and echo the stripes in the clothing in a vertical fashion. A background of this sort often gives the painting a mood and the abstraction in this one implies a thoughtful and creative thinker to my mind. In a watercolour one has “to know when to stop”, and joy picked just the right point. Things like that are often intuitive.