Gordon Rushmer is a well-known and highly regarded landscape painter. Gordon Rushmer: A World in Watercolour aptly opened in early December as Rushmer notes, ‘I’ve always been most at home in barren windswept places and winter has always been my most fruitful season.’
The paintings selected for this exhibition celebrated Rushmer’s keen sensitivity to the places and the landscapes within which he works, and his command of working in watercolour. British artists first began to explore the aesthetic qualities of watercolours in the latter part of the eighteenth century. For Rushmer the period from the late 1800s to the end of the Second World War was a golden age and work of painters including Eric Ravilious (1903-1942), Evelyn Dunbar (1906-1960), Thomas Hennell (1903-1945), John Nash (1893-1977), Charles Knight (1901-1990) and Stanley Badmin (1906-1989) offer continual inspiration.
Some of these artists were also war artists, as was Rushmer himself. His success as a landscape painter is matched by his reputation as a war artist from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. His war paintings were shown at the Imperial War Museum in 2008 and in 2011 his painting ‘The Burning of Gornji Vakuf, Bosnia’ (1997) was included in the exhibition ‘Watercolour’ at Tate Britain.
Born in Petersfield, Rushmer graduated from Farnham School of Art and worked as a graphic designer and illustrator. But painting is his passion, as is the Hampshire and Sussex landscape, which continues to be his main subject matter. Rushmer’s approach to painting is rooted in his experience of the place.
Rushmer described how he ‘walks the hills and countryside, preferably on my own. I have a camera for those fleeting moments of light and sketchbooks that fit down the back of my rucksack. Some pieces are in my head for months. I design each work in the abstract, weighing the shapes, colour masses and at the same time organising the compositional stresses. I take liberties with compositional content, often restructuring reality, removing elements I don’t want, and imposing my mood, so sometimes a piece may say more about me than the subject I have portrayed. ‘
Gordon Rushmer, Winter Kale, near South Harting, 2020, Watercolour on paper, Private collection.
Gordon Rushmer, Late Light, Bosham, 2020, Watercolour on paper, Private collection.