Rain Clouds

In this freely painted watercolor, a green field edged by dark trees is crowned by dramatically receding cloud that sheds curtains of rain. Clausen wrote of his technique, "I try to work as simply and directly as possible in watercolour…to put the colour on in one wash, without re-touching, for I think there is nothing so beautiful as a clean tint in watercolour...And even if it does not exactly run into the right place (for watercolour is a tricky medium) the quality of the colour has something of the spontaneity and effortless rightness that one finds in Nature itself." The artist engages with a mode pioneered in the eighteen-twenties by John Constable, while his fllattened forms and unconventional perspective demonstrate an awareness of recent aesthetic shifts in French art.