I like to look over the gallery every week, and to make comments where I feel I might have something useful to say; only if what I have to say is likely (in my opinion) to be helpful. I have benefited a lot from others' comments on my own work. Sometimes, though, I hesitate to comment - because the painting in front of me is fine, so far as it goes; I couldn't recommend any improvement; I don't for a moment suppose I could have done it any better ... but, if it doesn't depress me, it doesn't necessarily impress me either. Or rather, it is beset by one particular sin that I find frustrating - that is, it doesn't let go.... It would be a mistake to name any names here, because in one medium more than any other, almost any of us can do it. I've certainly done it myself (though hope I haven't shown any on POL). That medium is watercolour - every now and then, a watercolour will appear in the galleries which is so carefully drawn, so precise, so I-must-follow-every-contour-and-allow-no-overlap that I find it just dies on the paper. In oil and acrylic, or gouache, you tend to get good paintings or bad ones; some work, some don't. With watercolour, there is a third category: it works, sort of; it's skillfully done; but it's so infuriatingly careful that it's as dead as dust. Far be it from me to criticize. I am no kind of expert in watercolour. I've only been painting in it for a couple of years, and I know I have a tendency to employ too much detail. I know enough about it to understand that just letting go and having a bash can end up in an insipid mud on a cockled and useless bit of paper. And I also know that a carefully worked watercolour, over a delicate drawing in pencil or pen, can produce beautiful results, fabulous transparency, glazes of colour equalling the effect of stained glass. So it's not just the "careful" paintings that bother me. It's those, perhaps, in which the painter seems to have been filling in precisely predetermined shapes; not the loose sketch to which a painter has decided to add a bit of colour, but the very precise, somewhat laboured drawing, executed with enormous caution, which has then been coloured in - as it happens with watercolour, but it could as easily have been with pastel, crayon or coloured pencil. Not that many of this sort of painting appear here; many more appear in art club exhibitions - nearly always meticulously framed, they're not bad paintings: just - not particularly alive, either. I could wish that such painters would sometimes not reproduce a detailed drawing on the watercolour paper; would not carefully lay a grid over it to enlarge their original study; would certainly not trace a drawing (or worse, a photograph) with such painstaking care - but would just lay down a few expressive lines in pencil, if that, and then let the brush do the work. Their paintings would, I think, have more life; and be far more interesting - and also, in all probability truer to the subject. Ok, that's my provocation for this month. Open fire ......