Wayne Roberts, visual artist
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selected watercolours by Wayne Roberts | selected paintings 2 | feedback/contact

Lanslevillard, French Alps
watercolour on Saunders Waterford 600g cold-pressed paper, © copyright Wayne Roberts, private collection

Port Fairy Lighthouse, watercolour by Wayne Roberts
© copyright Wayne Roberts. All rights reserved.
The morning was freezing. I awoke at pre-dawn and peered through the curtains of our hotel room, my wife still fast asleep. The sky was dark but
appeared to be clear and there was no fog! I grabbed my travel watercolour gear and raced off in our hired Renault Clio up towards the
Lanslevillard village centre. Hurriedly finding a vantage point on a steep slope above a mountain stream that ran through the village I quickly
prepared my small watercolour pad, colours, brushes and water. A dairy farmer was leading his herd across the stone bridge below, bells clanged
around their necks, the only sound to be heard. The mountain peak (see painting above) was still in a purplish predawn shadow.
Then, in a startling instant, the first ray of dawn struck the highest element of the landscape: the very pinnacle of the triangular shaped mountain.
More radiant than a diamond on black velvet. So extremely bright and pointlike did it appear that I just sat transfixed. It was so incredibly beautiful.
An avalanche of dawn light rushed down the mountain. I began my painting, hands numb from the cold, water almost frozen.

The mountains have long inspired me. Their immense forms instill a sense of strength, a resoluteness that I may have hitherto forgotten or lost.
Yet at the same time there is a paradoxical feeling of my point-like existence, a node-point, connecting, hoping, longing, linking to
something forever and immeasurably grander, the thunderous pipe organ of Nature, reverberant in this cathedral of mountain
spires.