This morning I was pleased to find a major article in ‘El Observador’ about the Uruguayan water colourist, Alvaro Castagnet, one of whose paintings of a wet night streetscape in downtown Montevideo has graced our living rooms wall for some years.  Every time I look at his work I’m reminded how much I’ve always loved water colours.

A little water colour painting I bought over 60 years ago was my first art purchase  You may well ask why I didn’t bring it over to Uruguay instead of leaving it in my studio in Perth all the years I’ve been here?  Well, when my geologist husband came to Uruguay to search for gold on a shoe-string budget financed by some Perth-based investors in the late 90s, I was assured that ‘…it will be a quick job, in and out 2-3 years…’  Given that most exploration ventures prove there is nothing economically viable in any given area under study, plus at that time we were financially stretched and could not afford to move our stuff around the world, we decided to temporarily leave the house in the care of a friend’s daughter.  She became the first in a long line of ‘caretakers’, and we never actually ‘moved’ to Uruguay.  But our time here has extended for so many years, I now think of myself as an ‘accidental immigrant’.  Nothing stays the same for ever, though, and we’ve just sold the Perth house.  Our main goal next trip back will be to clear out our stuff there; and one of the first things I will do is pop this little painting into my handbag 🙂

The current website re-organisastion is going well, and a powerpoint on  the home page will show how landscape has always been the inspirational backdrop to my art.  Maybe this little postcard-size painting could be background for the title slide, since it is perhaps the most important art purchase I ever made 🙂  Naturally, my young eyes and brain didn’t make a connection at the time, but the fence or hedge lines in this little painting are the tracks of human activity.