DEREK
WALCOTT
203
strokes. There is a big difference between even, say, late Rembrandt and
Degas. So, I may have said once that I don't feel I have the life inside my
wrists to be a painter, because at the time I may have been comparing my–
selfwith other painters whose style was much more vehement than mine.
DM:
Is part of your attraction to watercolor the way watercolor can catch
nuances oflight?
DW:
Watercolor's an extremely difficult medium in the tropics. It's more or
less a temperate medium, though not entirely, because you have obvious
exceptions in Winslow Homer and Hopper, for instance. In the tropics, the
dramatic division that exists between the horizon and the bottom of the hori–
zon, in other words between the sky and the foreground, is extremely dra–
matic. It's almost complementary, in terms of the hues that are there. The
incredible blue that is there in the tropics is almost impossible to get - the
heat
of that blue - in watercolor. And it may be silly to think it's because the paint
is made in temperate countries. That's maybe a facetious attitude to have,
but look at the palette that exists for watercolor in the tropics, where
shadows are black, black-green, or contain black, which you can't really use in
watercolor. And the fact that you saturate the surface of the paper some–
times with a tone on which you can dip the paint is not quite useful in the
tropics. I mean here the lines are hard, but there the lines are hard-edged,
and you have a very hard time manipulating them into any kind of subtlety.
If you see a negative of the tropics, you realize why cameramen always find
it much harder to photograph in tropic light than they do in the magic hour at
twilight or right after dawn.
One other thing that astonishes and exasperates painters from the
north is that what they see in front of them is a lot of green, basic hues of
green, green and red. I remember I was going out to do some painting, and
there was a German tourist in a small hotel where I was staying. He said he
couldn't paint there because it was too
green.
I think it's the way he looks at
the color. Obviously there is subtlety, an immense amount of variety in tones
of the green that exist in front of you. And there is haze in the rain or early
morning, and so on. But, in a way, forms in the tropics are almost emblem–
atic; they're very hard and bright. I think that to try to capture that on paper
means that the words have to be used almost as heavily as strokes are used
in paint. Just to put down "blue" or "green" is not enough, because that's a
postcard. What matters is how you manage to get into that blue whatever
other variations and subtleties and orchestrations that one tries to get in the
words
so that you can feel the sensuality, the presence and the texture of,
say, water and crisp sand, of going into cool water, that sudden change of
temperature that exists between light and shade in the tropics.
DM:
So it's a problem of very strong contrasts and maybe too much light?
DW:
Well, if you say it's too much light, it means God has made a mistake,
you know. There can never be too much light. It's the glare that is there. No
