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Some of my earliest childhood memories are of the pencil drawings I used to do, mostly of the things around me but also of abstract patterns and designs just from my imagination. My mother saved a number of them and showed them to me many years later. I think she may once have been worried that I would turn out to be ever so slightly weird, maybe she was right but nevertheless she did encourage my artistic efforts. What struck me later though was the control I had over the pencil and how accurately I could draw what I saw.
I can remember one occasion in my junior school during an art lesson, when most of the children were painting what looked like a bright green lollipop on a fat brown stick, the teacher called me out to the front, gave me a piece of chalk and said, "Terry, show the class how to draw a tree!" As I grew older and more interested in painting skills I received a lot of help from my father, himself an amateur but accomplished watercolourist. Those skills have never left me and today I have to resist the inclination to paint exactly what I see, instead of an interpretation of it, and try to avoid a photographic appearance.
Terry Freemantle working in his studio
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I suppose most of my work has been of the landscape because I find the infinite variety of colour and form in nature so interesting. Often when I have been out walking with my wife, or playing golf, I have found myself being left behind because I am studying the sky, a particular tree, or how the sun transforms a scene as it emerges from behind a cloud. Among the 25 or so tubes of watercolour I have there is not a single green, as I find the best way to paint the endless range of nature's greens is to mix them, and I rarely use a palette of more than six or seven colours for any painting.
I like the challenge of watercolour. Apart from the obvious, such as the control of wet-into-wet washes which want to run everywhere, there is a lot of planning and concentration involved. Because I cannot paint light over dark the issue of where and how to retain the highlights is an issue I have to resolve before I start a painting, and to be remembered during its progress. Mistakes, or changes of mind, cannot simply be painted over and many of my paintings hit the bin long before the finish, I cannot continue something if I am unhappy with it and I am my own severest critic. My wife and I hold a private viewing after each painting is completed, myself from a technical stance and she as the “mystery shopper”.
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