Nadee's Stories Untold: making beautiful what is futile

People speak of a sense of calm and quiet contemplation surrounding these paintings, and yes they aren't wrong. You can almost sense the artist carefully, methodically, apply stroke after stroke to paper, transforming it with intent. To say that Nadee's watercolour skills are impressive would be an understatement, and it's been incredible to witness the evolution of her body of work. And yet, on the back of the plaintive strings floating in the background, the melancholy lingers, not oppressively, but as part and parcel of her work. It seems suffused with a quiet despair.

Nadee's first solo exhibition was held here too, and it is maybe worth an aside that the two exhibitions share the same physical space though in different times.

Unlike the previous exhibition, the strokes here are more sensuous, and Nadee experiments with shades, she is content to continue and develop a line of thought from years back. Her beautiful sketchbook is the apotheosis of this, a true marvel that shows off her almost granular understanding of the watery realm.

This exhibition is personal, expressive, even indulgent, but then art comes from self-indulgence: that what you take to be the case with the world, how you see it, matters. And Nadee's preoccupation with an aspect of the world has lasted years - it is when she transcribes the waves on their own that the works shine the most. There is a feeling that something is amiss with the others, the child by the shore, the journal held in palms, the life buoy – and it begs us to examine things a little more. In them the implicit loneliness becomes more expressive, the loss even more apparent.

Some have also said that these are meditations on form and substance, on the boundary between them: liminality is the word of the time, the wave as intermediary, as metaphor. In mathematics, a wave is a function, it has an amplitude. In reality, waves are what surround our islands, what we see when we interrupt our little lives to peer out at the horizon – amplifying or even dulling like a narcotic whatever it is that we feel. How many of us trapped on this little island can spare the time to observe the waves?

Meanwhile, the audio-visual component of the exhibition, while enjoyable, felt a little too on the nose and superfluous.

That said, whatever joy that exists in these paintings are lathered in loss – they carry a palpable psychosomatic heaviness. Impermanence reigns in this world, the waves themselves are markers of this. And I think that is one of the deeper ideas that animates this exhibition, how something can envelop everything and fade into non-being, and the toll of this knowledge on the artist. Look on my works ye mighty and despair, wrote a poet. Nothing beside remains.

Our problem is that we find our being a problem. And it doesn't have a solution – or it has too many and we're petrified in the face of such bewildering choice. Nadee of course has chosen art, and in doing so, she has made beautiful what is futile. It is kind of romantic, and in being that, it feels out of time.

Yes, it all ends in tears, she knows. Yet the relentless toil of the waves seem to mirror the toil of the artist herself and it makes me think of that expression: how the Greeks must have suffered to have been so beautiful.