DogCat and Landscapes: Clare Haward | Grant Watson

DOGCAT AND LANDSCAPES | 13th - 29th March 2025

Painted worlds of Clare Haward and Grant Watson

Dogcat and Landscapes arose out of studio visits and conversations between two painters who find resonance with each other's work. The familiar and the strange come together in works that each artist may not have thought to share

Clare on Grant

A few years ago I visited Grant’s studio. It was full of paintings; beginnings, ends, small studies, huge canvases, maquettes, paintings painted over and a massive stack of red, yellow and blue palettes in the corner. A painters studio.

Grant’s paintings are painterly. They aren’t paintings of things, they are paintings. They are the paintings of someone who works without a rigid ‘method’. He has a process, has developed a sense of colour, draws with paint, experiments with motifs, draws inspiration from the observed world. They look effortless, but you can see the paint searching for the form. The paintings burst with light, sometimes built up to a thick opaque impasto, other times a thin layer barely there. Gentle observations, bold marks, careful balance, composition, structure. The motif kind of dissolves into or emerges from the surface.

They have strong abstract qualities. They deal with line and colour, often in surprising ways. They are evocative, poetic but not necessarily literal. They portray a familiar world. I loved his work the minute I saw it. As someone who graduated in 2000, the supposed ‘death of painting’ hung heavy, the contemporary conversation was very much anti-painting. Grant’s paintings remind me of the mid 90’s when I was at Camberwell and saw the Leon Kossoff show at Tate Britain. I knew then I was a painter and loved everything about it, but it took me about ten years to come back to it.

The motifs in Grant’s paintings are all around him - the Londis on the corner, the imposing church with its dark round window, his dog, drawings from a weekend at the coast. These motifs can merge into hybrid presences, dogcats or birds becoming waves. Sometimes he makes them, clay fish or papier mache buildings and cats. Something physical to start from. We found similar subjects, his father, my mother, his street, my window, horses for some reason, swimmers. Painting our worlds. Memory, or something like that, is important. We are different, I can’t seem to get away from solid planes, whereas Grant’s forms weave in and out of the surface. But there are echoes.

Grant on Clare

What a pleasure to get to know the person whose paintings you’ve long admired. I always think that if you love someone’s work, you’re bound to like the person who made it. It’s actually not always true but it certainly was with Clare.

After several visits to Clare’s studio, it became clear not only that I’m hopeless at reversing the car out of tight spots, but also that we share a similar temperament—both of us prone to worrying. Worrying about our paintings. With Clare, I think this is a good thing. Never fully satisfied, she continuously reworks her paintings, in search of something that remains elusive on a deeper, psychological level. Matisse’s observation, that ‘every move in a painting seems to suggest three more…’comes to mind when thinking about Clare’s painting approach. A triangle, a circle, and figures symbolising a familiar person may materialise only to be transformed again, the scenario changed to a place balanced between figuration and abstraction.

I think there are two kinds of painters: one who uses paint as a straightforward tool for rendering an image or translating an idea, and another who is in love with the stuff, drawn to its alchemic potential. Clare is definitely the latter. I’m in awe of her knowledge—she truly understands her materials, and there’s an enviable sophistication in how she manipulates them.

There’s a wealth of knowledge in every brushstroke. Its not the sort of knowledge that stifles though, she knows when it’s necessary to work against technical refinement, embracing intuition and the unpredictability of paint.

I love the evocative spaces Clare creates in her work. I see them as psychological realms—mysterious places where the sense of depth feels so convincing, achieved through the interplay of planes.

Clare’s work is never the "in-your-face" kind of painting. They don’t shout, look at me! Instead, they’re beautifully quiet, even delicate at times. Her subtle use of colour and touch—whether she’s painting a landscape, portrait, still life, or a memory—creates an intimacy and atmosphere that is often breathtakingly moving.

In many ways, the lead-up to this exhibition has been a journey of discovery. Will our paintings speak to each other, and if so, what will they say? And let’s see what happens if we get to choose each other’s paintings for the exhibition. (Although we did have a veto, it was only used once or twice.) Paintings of Clare’s mum and mine of my dad—who knew our compositions of them would be so similar! And those horses… they’re bound to speak, surely. There’s only one way to find out: put them in the same room and see what happens.

Painting has its own language, and ours are pretty close in dialect. It’s great when you can say something like, “That tonal shift in your painting is barely perceptible, but it’s enough to break your heart,” and be immediately understood—no further explanation needed. I can’t remember ever actually saying that to Clare, but if I had, I know she’d get it straight away.