Taking another look at the fine art of watercolour painting

Wakefield-born Martin Creed wins the Turner Prize with a light which automatically switches on and off. Tracy Emin shows us her bed. Damien Hirst takes a sword to a sheep. In an age when this means art, wherefore watercolours?

Sheffield Millennium Galleries' latest exhibition not only finds a place in the modern world for watercolours, it positively celebrates the medium.

Watercolour in Britain: Tradition and Beyond takes another look at the oft maligned medium to celebrate its diversity.

The very word watercolour evokes a certain image: Turner's landscapes, JR Cozens' country views. Sheffield's latest exhibition explodes that image.

Co-curator Liz Waring begins a guided tour of the exhibition and reveals that from the start visitors should be braced for the impact. If they are expecting to see gentle hillside views of the English rolling countryside, they will eventually find what they are looking for, but not before an exhibition which takes them on a journey through the possibility of watercolour.

"People think of it as a traditionally British medium and it has been grasped by British artists," says Waring, curator of visual art at Museums Sheffield.

"But we wanted to challenge that notion, so we open with Chinese and Indian artists who are working with watercolours."

The first of nine sections, the Introduction also features the work of Chris Ofili, the Turner Prize winning Young British Artist famed for using elephant dung in his paintings. "To have an artist of the calibre of Chris Ofili, a contemporary artist using watercolours, as you come into the exhibition is a great start and it shows visitors immediately that they can think of watercolour in a different way."

The exhibition is the first in the Great British Art Debate at Museums Sheffield. The four-year project is a collaboration with Tate Britain, Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service and Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums alongside Sheffield Museums. The collaboration aims to explore British identity through national and regional art collections and get people thinking about what it means to be British, how that is reflected in the country's art collections.

A Picture of Them and A Picture of Us, two exhibitions held in Sheffield last year, provided a small taster of the great debate, but this exhibition sees the full launch of the project.

Waring says: "This is what the Great British Art Debate is about – looking at the work we have, the work in our collections, and what it says about us."

After the introduction to the exhibition, there are a further eight sections which take visitors on a huge journey through watercolour, the history of the medium and the various ways it is used.

The sections include: the work of Edward Burra, JMW Turner, Watercolour as the Sculptor's Medium, Travelling with Colour, Dreamers and Surrealists, Ruskin and Pre-Raphaelitism, William Blake and a section focussing on the work of watercolour painters who captured images of Sheffield.

If the introduction to the exhibition, with its Eastern and Asian paintings and the work of Ofili, is surprising to visitors expecting traditional watercolour, then the section of work by Edward Burra is even more so. Waring says: "The work we have is taken from when he was painting around the time of the Second World War. His nightmarish, surrealist vision is entirely unexpected, as is the size and scale of his work. He was often ill during his lifetime and he found watercolours easier to handle than oils, but he wanted to paint on a scale normally associated with oils.

"The impact of the work is quite something and entirely unexpected of a watercolour exhibition. We've already seen visitors peeping around the corner to see the work when they get a glimpse of it in the second section of the exhibition."

Those with a more traditional bent, need not be concerned. The exhibition caters for them also.

The Turner works include several of the pieces he painted while touring Yorkshire. Waring says: "I have always been a fan of work on paper, but in pulling this exhibition together, I have become a huge fan of watercolour. Historically it was seen as somehow inferior to oil and other mediums, perhaps because it is seen as a medium that anyone can pick up

and use.

"Hopefully this exhibition redresses the balance and shows people the possibilities of watercolour."

n Sheffield Millennium Galleries, to September 5.