Artists Bio:
Rosemary Whittle is a watercolour artist who uses maps as a method to explore medium, colour, and line in her work. She studied at Falmouth University before earning a degree in Critical Fine Art Practice from the University of Brighton in 2012. Following her studies, she worked at The David Roberts Art Foundation and Pitzhanger Manor House and Gallery before transitioning into a career in Library Services in 2013. She spent the next ten years in this industry, developing a deep appreciation for community engagement and creative spaces.
In 2023, after being made redundant from her role in Hillingdon Libraries, Rosemary embraced the opportunity to return to her art practice. She began experimenting with watercolour anew, finding ways to adapt the medium to the practicalities of life with small children. In 2024, she joined a local artist group, started exhibiting her work, and began taking commissions while further developing her unique artistic style.
Rosemary finds joy in exploring various mark-making techniques, such as using salt and sponges, observing the effects of adding acrylic inks to wet watercolour, and experimenting with super-granulating colours as they intermingle or are layered. Each new discovery fills her with amazement and wonder. There is an inherent element of uncertainty in her process—her paintings begin as wet-on-wet swathes of colour that are allowed to bleed together. They are not fully under her control; the pigments move where they please.
Maps have become Rosemary’s ideal way of exploring these ideas. She is particularly fascinated by the unique quality of map lines, which is why she isolates them from other elements such as text and symbols. This approach allows her to further explore line and mark-making. The use of masking fluid provides some level of control over the wet medium, allowing her to observe how pigment gathers in the shapes or overflows and continues beyond them.
However, Rosemary’s maps are more than just explorations of shape and form—the locations themselves hold deep personal meaning. They represent places that have shaped her life, from the area where she has lived her whole life, where her family are, and where her children were born, to London—the city on whose outskirts she resides. Since having children, she has begun to rediscover London and see it in a new way. Maps, for Rosemary, are representations of the marks that humans have left on the world. Through her art, she uses them to explore the marks she can create.
Based in North West London, Rosemary’s work frequently draws on this location, using maps that are familiar and somehow comforting to her. Her watercolour pieces, centered around maps, reflect her fascination with place, home, medium and line, combining fluid colour with intricate line work to create evocative interpretations of cartography.
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