Description

Jonathan Meuli Water Land Scroll 1 is inspired by water and about water as a subject. It is a wonderfully lively work, and especially because of its impressive length, it evokes the endless rolling waves of the ocean. It is mixed media: painted in watercolour, pastel and oils. Its colour ranges from purples and browns to greens, blues to black. It can be unrolled and pinned to the wall, so its full length is visible. However it is perhaps most enticing shown flat and rolled at the edges. Then a little can be unrolled at a time, revealing different fragments.

Water Land Scroll 1  has been on display in Japan Water, where we showed it in a glass display case. The artist has previously shown it on a wall opened out to its full size.

The horizontal hand scroll is a characteristic of Japanese art. It probably originated from India as early as the 4th century. Traditionally, a scroll is kept on rollers in a special container and viewed little by little over time. Part of its charm is that the whole scroll is rarely seen at once, although Jonathan has before now shown the whole length of the scroll on the wall.

About the artist

Jonathan Meuli originally studied art history in Cambridge. He followed with an MA at the University of East Anglia, before becoming a painter in his own right. He lives and works now in Glasgow, but maintains close links with East Anglia, for example showing a selection of his landscape and abstract paintings at Wolfson College Cambridge in 2018.

Jonathan is a great admirer of Japanese master of the woodcut, Hokusai (Katsushika Hokusai, 1760-1849). An especially important influence is the Great Wave off Kanagawa, one of  ’36 Views of Mount Fuji’, his famous woodcut series from 1829-1833.