Imagine having your own island and currency. Your own language, even a font all your own. A passport issued by yourself, to yourself, which hoodwinks you through passport controls elsewhere in the world while you smile wryly beneath your flowing silver locks. A cloak of many colours to envelop you. A palette of many hues in your hand, and a brush poised. Welcome to the wonderful world of Walter Battiss.
Battiss’s friend Esmé Berman, one of the earliest Fookians, once wrote: “You will seek in vain for the location of the island, for it eludes conventional cartography. It is not a place you arrive at, you are either there or not there.” Lost in the artist’s watercolours, I slid into that world of the imagination, Fook Island revealing itself in the mists, as it does for those with the eyes to see.
On our brightly hued watercolour island, there would be a welling of excitement as Spring approached and we knew it was time for the Fook Island Festivities, known by some island wags as the Fookinalia, when every tree and dwelling would be garlanded in every hue of every Walter Battiss painting and the dress code would be don’t-bother.
It is especially valued for its depiction of rock art and prehistoric rock shelters and for what Ros Turner calls “His earlier more realistic work had taken a turn to the abstract around 1940 and, after meeting Pablo Picasso andBut, despite the joyful use of colour and form in much of his painting, it’s in an upstairs room where his watercolours are displayed that my jaw dropped. You don’t really expect that of watercolours, but his are translucent. Alive. They transcend the palette.
But there’s a more serious side to the museum. They need help. They need funds for maintenance, to keep it going.was set up and we are looking for corporate funding,” said Turner. Things had been going quite well, the museum was attracting visitors, “but Covid put paid to that. Then of course the lockdown had an impact on us because people on road trips used to come to see us”. Foot traffic ground to a halt and Turner spent her lockdown making theand sitting it out.
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