Richard Wathen
Eilir, 2024
Watercolour on paper
38,5 x 28,5 cm
Unique
Over the last few years, Richard Wathen started making watercolour portraits – sketches, as it were, for more refined portraits in oil. These meditative portraits, combining an expressive brushstroke with a typically saturated colour palette, quickly lost their status as a sketch and became a new series within Wathen’s painterly practice.
After three collaborations over the last two years, artlead once again invited Richard Wathen to create a series of unique watercolour portraits. This is a last chance for those who were too late then, or like to put together a diptych.
The name Eilir has its origins in the Welsh language and holds the symbolic meaning of Butterfly. In Welsh mythology, butterflies were often associated with transformation and rebirth, representing the cycle of life.
If you paid attention, you certainly saw two other characters hidden between the Eilir Series. These two unique portraits are hors-série, friends who wandered in, fellow butterfly lovers, who knows…
