During his years lecturing at Elam (1930-54) it was John Weeks' custom to take his students down to the wharves along Quay St to sketch the boats moored there. These scenes were tailor-made for an artist whose forte lay in his use of colour and his draughtsmanship of architectural form and landscape. He had encountered similar scenes during his time in Europe.

Largely from the time of the Impressionists, artists began to put down on the canvas not what they knew was there but what they saw. Gone were the intricate details and in its place were sweeps of the brush indicating what could be seen at a quick glance. This was optical realism as opposed to intellectual realism. The human eye cannot pick up fine details at a distance so why put them in?

You may think that the mooring rope looks as if it has been chewed by a mouse! Well, in a sense, it has except that the mouse happens to be the sun which, when shining on drops of water splashed on an object, dissipates the form and it disappears from our view. We can see Weeks using this effect on the edge of the dinghy to the left, on the ropes attached to the mast of the yacht, and even on the sails of the yacht in the background on the right-hand side. Monet and Renoir worked together at the end of the 1860s in Argenteuil, riverside resorts on the Seine not far from Paris, and in their works from this period this illusionistic effect is very clearly seen. ANGELA MACKIE