We meet artist Moira Frith, whose work for our latest seasonal postcard began with shells, rock pools and a small set of watercolours given one Christmas many years ago. Moira Frith first fell for watercolour at about seven, when her parents gave her a small set of paints for Christmas.
The first thing she remembers painting was an angelfish. “It was probably really rubbish,” she says, but that hardly seems the point. What stayed with her was the thrill of having proper paints of her own and seeing what happened when colour met water.
She carried on painting through school and A-level art, then rather forgot about it for a while. It was only in her thirties, after her eldest daughter was born, that she found herself returning to it.
Watercolour was an easy place to begin again. She still had the paints, for one thing, but she also liked the looseness of the process. Wet colour could be laid down in blocks, another layer added over the top, the edges allowed to bleed into one another. “There are all of these lovely effects of the water bleeding,” she says. “It can be quite a meditative process.” There is something very appealing about that. Watercolour has a habit of doing a little of what it likes, however carefully you might have planned otherwise.
Moira tends to paint in the morning. Partly because she is a morning person, but mostly because natural light makes life much easier when colour is your business. Paint by lamplight in winter, she says, and everything can look perfectly fine until the following morning, when it suddenly does not. Daylight is rather less forgiving, but considerably more useful.
Her work sits somewhere between observation and imagination. Drawing from life matters to her because it gives her something real to begin with. The angle of a shape, the relationship between colours, the way one thing sits beside another. It also gives her a way of making work that feels like her own. “If you’re drawing something from life, you can only ever be yourself,” she says.
For the work she created for Rowen & Wren, that observation often began by the sea. Moira likes rock pooling, looking for shells and collecting what she calls “marine beachy bits”. Over time, those things have become a sort of reference library in her head.
By the time she sat down to paint this body of work, there was no shell carefully positioned beside the paper and no photograph propped up for reference. Instead, she was working from things she had already noticed and remembered. That is where she allows herself to have a little fun. A familiar shape might become blue or red simply because it feels right. Something seen on the shoreline does not have to remain exactly as nature intended once it reaches the page.
There is another part of painting that still surprises Moira. When somebody she does not know buys one of her pieces, she finds it enormously flattering. More than anything, she likes the thought of a painting ending up in someone else’s home and quietly becoming part of everyday life. “You see it every day,” she says. “It becomes part of the fabric of their life.” It is a lovely thought. Something made one morning at a table, from a memory of a shell or a shape spotted in a rock pool, eventually finding its place on somebody else’s wall. And, for this season, one small piece of Moira’s world has found its way onto our latest postcard too.
