Views on the work of Ronald William Webb  

 

THE COLOUR SEAS

by Juan Elorduy

About half a century ago, an american painter attached to Action Painting, Mark Rothko, created what was called "The Color Fields". In his work, the colour fields are formed by the overlap of two colour stripes which like a win­dow, open up onto naked, silent landscapes. Rothko's landscapes are immense and tragic.

"I'm not an abstractionist." said Rothko. "I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on ".

In 2002 Ronald William Webb arrived in Menorca from another island, Great Britain, with a personal background that brought him to fill his life with painting and passion. Although at first he was interested in architecture and orientalism, painting made him become convinced that every­thing can be translated into colour. The music has colour and the colour has music also; and both can cause and share the same emotion. Oh, and feeling, as well. Feelings emerge and bloom between the greys and the gold, feelings can be cradled with a stroke of a paintbrush and caressed while they merge into mauve; purple becomes poe­tic and moss greens recite Shakespeare's verse;black, when the moment comes, wants to establish order, but a proud green calls out his fears at being trapped by the reds. Colour is a game to play, it is harmony and contrast, the subtlety of a veil or the generosity of impasto. Only colour.

Ronald W. Webb, the painter, has wished to dress all other art expressions with the blanket of colour, of his colours: Architecture, music, thea­tre, poetry, painting, everything reinterpreted, felt, loved, shared. And has done it with exquisite sensitivity.

Rothko used to paint quiet, solemn and mystical colour fields which led him to his tragic destiny. Ronald W. Webb does not paint colour fields but colour seas, deep, rich and expressive seas; seas that find inspiration in a deeply felt culture and life; seas that invite us to sail cradled by their waves, strirred up by their swirls or becalmed on their beaches, full of sound as running water, vibrant as light, colour seas that lead us towards life.

Juan Elorduy

Menorca, April 2005

THE ART OF MUSIC - by Barnaby Edwards

CREATING THE COLOUR OF MUSIC