Watercolor spots by Samantha Hahn
Watercolor spots by Samantha Hahn
Watercolor is a felicitous and spontaneous medium. Notoriously unforgiving, it works best for artists who strike a fine balance of skillfully harnessing its unpredictable character and gracefully accepting its chance-like meanderings. The combination of both this control and this letting go has given the medium its freshness—the sense that its images are always on the precipice of blossoming or dissolving, each held in one fleeting moment of time. The good watercolor is, perhaps, a mere visual record of its becoming.
Watercolor is also an intimate medium; its tools (brushes, a small palette, and pigment tubes or cakes) fit in a knapsack or even a large pocket, and the artist can cultivate his or her inspiration just about anywhere—on a city park bench, at a café table, or on a train. This has made the medium popular to Sunday painters, documentarians, and the obsessively driven alike. It has also made it favorable to young children, who include a tray of watercolor paints and a brush among their first school supplies.
While often shadowed under the more “serious” medium of oil painting, watercolor has proved to be as elegant and academic as its counterpart, while retaining its own ebullience and congeniality. In the twentieth century especially, the medium achieved “high art” status in works by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Egon Schiele, and Joseph Beuys. Contemporary artists, from Anselm Kiefer to Gerhard Richter, have also employed the medium in some of their most colorful pieces.
The medium of watercolor, by simple definition, is that in which paints or pigments are suspended in a water-soluble medium, bound by an agent such as glue, casein, or gum; the word watercolor is typically reserved for transparent washes, while opaque watercolor is called gouache. Today we know the paint most commonly in its manufactured form, whereby the pigment is bound in natural gum arabic and honey or glycerin to increase its plasticity and the ease by which it is dissolved. Prior to this concoction, “watercolor” existed in various other forms, including tempera, distempera, and water and ink. Historically, other water-bound pigments have included vermilion, ocher, malachite, and other earth colors; pigments have also been made from sources as unexpected as dried cochineal beetles and the ink sacks of squids. We associate watercolor most readily with works on paper, but the medium, in its many historical variations, has graced other supports including silks and other fabrics, parchments and vellums, and wood.
Watercolor, because of the easy accessibility of its two main components—water and pigment—has an old history, long predating oil and acrylic paints. Two-dimensional impressions made by water have perhaps always existed in nature: the design of a dried-up puddle, the elegant streaking on the side of a cliff. Intentionally mixing this element with color to form human works of art has historical precedents throughout the world. Ancient Egyptians used water-based paints to ornament the walls of their temples and tombs, and they created the earliest known version of paper by utilizing papyrus, a reedy plant whose inner pith was beaten together, dried, and polished to form a single smooth sheet. Painted icons have long been colored in distemper on murals and church walls in Ethiopia as well as on metals, woods, and goatskins. In India and Persia, opaque gouache was used in paintings to depict stories from their histories and religions; and tempera was utilized in ancient and medieval Indian caves and temples.
Chinese and Japanese painters are generally regarded for their created ink-and-water works of calligraphy and landscape on silk and fine handmade papers, and for their mounting of such supports onto rods to form scrolls. The earliest known paintings in China reveal basic patterns and designs, which gave way to later representations of the physical world. These underpinnings led both to calligraphy and to a legacy of depictions including human figures, contemplative landscapes, narratives, and “simple subjects” such as flower blossoms, animals, or pieces of fruit.
Traditional Chinese water-based painting has been found on walls, pottery, lacquerware, and folding screens. Importantly, however, in the second century C.E. paper was invented in China. Possibly inspired by the nest materials of wasps, a kind of paper similar to what we know and use today was first made from tree bark, hemp remnants, cloth rags, and fishing nets. In the ensuing centuries, the knowledge of papermaking began to spread outside of China, first to Korea and Japan, then to the Arab world and India, and to Europe.
Watercolor painting in the West is believed to have originated in European caves of the Paleolithic period; these early artists used fingers, stones, and branches to execute their water-and-pigment depictions, often of animals. Panel painting was highly prized in ancient Greece and Rome, and tempera-painted examples can be found from as early as the first centuries of the Common Era.
Versions of painted manuscripts date to Roman times, but most surviving examples are from the Middle Ages. European monks used tempera—often in combination with silverpoint, gold or silver, and ink—to decorate their illuminated manuscripts. Their pages were detailed with scrollwork, border decorations, gilding, and symbolic iconography, often on parchment or vellum made from lambskin, kidskin, or calfskin.
The first paper mill in Europe was established on the Iberian Peninsula in the mid-twelfth century, and substantive paper manufacture in Europe began in the second half of the thirteenth century in Fabriano, Italy—at a factory that continues today to produce papers and can be toured by connoisseurs and lovers of paper. Papermaking in Europe laid the base, quite literally, for watercolors that began to resemble the art form as we know it best today.
Although Renaissance artists initially employed watercolor for colored maps, zoological and botanical illustrations, or as studies and cartoons for paintings that they would later execute in oils, some used the water-based medium to create substantial works of art. Among them, the German artist Albrecht Dürer and the Flemish artist Hans Bol created watercolor works of observational acuity and mystical ambience.
Watercolor underwent further explorations and innovations in Great Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prior to such time, watercolor artists had purchased their pigments from apothecaries or “colormen,” and such pigments were provided as hard, dry clumps that were difficult to break down into a soluble form. As a result, artists concocted various, sometimes laborious, methods alongside secret recipes for formulating their paints.
Watercolor spots by Samantha Hahn
In 1766 William Reeves began to manufacture his own paints in a basement workshop and displayed the colors in his store windows. He made and sold the first dry-cake watercolors, and in 1780 he applied honey to his paints, making them more moist and pliable. William Winsor and Henry Newton, in 1835, introduced glycerin to their watercolor cakes, further softening the pigment; and in 1846 they again modified the formula, creating the first watercolor paints available in tubes.
Tamara Thomsen’s watercolor brushes
These developments made watercolor accessible beyond a snug sphere of artists, expanding to hobbyists, watercolor societies, and finishing-school ladies alike. It is purported that Queen Victoria even sent carriages to the Winsor & Newton store to pick up paints for her studies. Other developments were made in the chemistry of pigments, creating a more vibrant palette for the painters of the time—most especially the Pre-Raphaelites who dabbled in the medium—and resembling more closely the colors we associate with watercolor art today.
Outside of its salons and societies, nineteenth-century Britain elevated watercolor painting in the art-historical canon through some of the greatest artists of the medium. Among them was Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose ravishing and layered watercolor landscapes easily rival the works that he and other artists made in oil.
Watercolor also began to flourish in the United States at this time. The ornithologist and painter John James Audubon made 435 preparatory watercolors for his book The Birds of America (1827–1838), still a respected work on the subject. The painter Thomas Moran’s watercolors, made during the artist’s visit to Yellowstone in 1871, were presented to the U.S. Congress as part of the successful campaign to designate it as America’s first national park in 1872. In the twentieth century, one of America’s best-known painters was the realist Andrew Wyeth, who worked primarily with watercolor; his Helga Pictures, comprising many watercolor pieces, are arguably some of the most iconic works in recent art memory.
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The artists showcased in this collection are among the most interesting and exuberant watercolorists working today. While they draw upon the medium’s historical themes and processes, they also extend that history into the contemporary backdrop, which includes the clatter and barrage of a media-driven world, neo-surreal morphologies, postmodern shifts and collaging, technological isolation and its denatured environment, and the subsequent layering of narratives and meanings that infuse our daily existences.
In our Internet era, watercolor has proven itself an adaptable medium for the backlit computer screen. It illustrates blogs and websites with much of the same vibrancy it achieves on paper. Also, because of its small scale, watercolor art can often be shown life-size on the glowing monitor. Consequently, online galleries and shops have been able to appropriately highlight the medium to collectors and buyers, and the artists’ works are easily moved from the paint-splattered studio table onto a worldwide stage.
Sujean Rim, whose background includes fashion illustration, has also illustrated children’s books and previously she decorated the popular email newsletter Daily Candy. The handmade quality of her watercolors lends a human touch to the graphic sterility of type and design that characterize much of the Internet’s aesthetic; each morning, readers of Daily Candy were welcomed with bright red apples, chirping birds, stacks of books, and swirling goldfish, among other renderings so fresh as to still appear wet on the paper upon which they were made. In Rim’s other artworks, elements from fashion emerge: stylish handbags, poufy party dresses, boxes stamped with designers’ names. Perhaps never before has a pair of stiletto heels been depicted with such capricious delight (page 111).
Samantha Hahn, another illustrator, also integrates fashion in her watercolor works: fancy ladies, Warholian perfume bottles, beribboned hats. She too depicts simple details from life: a spunky French bulldog, butterflies and dragonflies, meringue topped with pomegranate. Hahn is also virtuosic in her use of color: brightly clad characters stroll through contemporary urban backgrounds in her renderings displayed on Daily Candy.
Another illustrator working in the theme of fashion and everyday detail is Julia Denos, whose images include pretty patterns, ballet flats, and a variety of vegetables. In one depiction of a cut-open beet, watercolor is employed to capture the matching essence of a beet stain (page 33); in another, the bleeding green paint creates the natural gradation of color in a head of lettuce (page 35). Denos has created her illustrated images for advertising, books, and magazine covers.
A woman in an elegant black ball gown is among the works of Virginia Johnson, a textile artist who also creates watercolor artworks. Design motifs from her fabric prints appear in some of her watercolors, some as direct depictions of such designs, others as design elements that work within more representational compositions. In one image, Potted Fern, a woman stands against a patterned background, but because the woman is painted with lines and shapes similar to what lies behind her, she becomes entwined within the design (page 55). This creates a dynamic struggle and a balance between abstract design and representational elements, which may be an aspect of a watercolorist’s process—to make from randomness an objective form.
The women in Cate Parr’s paintings are also held in the delicate webbing of human depiction and painterly flourish. Her subjects, often celebrities, appear inflamed in vivid streaks and washes; some look placid, even trapped, within the brushstrokes, while others seem to resist. Compellingly, and through her alchemy of the watercolor medium, the artist transforms the media photography of such famous persons as Charlotte Gainsbourg, Daphne Guinness, and Jeanne Moreau by restoring a psychological reality to each of the painted subjects.
Daire Lynch also creates portraits of psychological intensity. Unlike Cate Parr’s glamorous women pulled from the pages of fashion magazines, Lynch’s subjects seem drawn from street corners, family photo albums, high-school yearbooks, or the back rooms of bars and parties. His sitters, painted primarily in French ultramarine, do not necessarily exude the melancholy we have perhaps come to associate with the color blue. Instead, Lynch’s depicted humans seem contemplative, even yearning, balanced on the edges of many possible emotions; this not-one-dimensional interpretation is perhaps the most accurate rendering of any model or person—and watercolor, which can run in any direction at any moment, serves as an appropriate medium.
Samantha Hahn’s worktable
It is tempting to imagine in Amy Ross’s surreal work that the spills of watercolor lead to depictions not otherwise thought, thereby inducing a world different from the one that nature supplies. The artist’s painted humans begin to blur into other forms in her tightly rendered work. Some of Ross’s subjects mask their faces by holding up leaves or flotsam; others seem wholly transformed with wolf heads atop their human bodies. These partial humans seem to approach their otherwise normal natural environments with both caution and curiosity, as though reality is something strange to these beings who, at least in one painting, are of question to an onlooking dog (page 123). Elsewhere in the artist’s works, more strange things occur: birds appear to grow from trees, woodpeckers sprout mushroom heads (page 122).
Isadora Reimão also works with morphing beings. Pumpkin Charles sports an enlarged and oddly shaped ear along with science-fiction tubing and mechanical apparatuses. The Caterpillar bears the top portion of a human female. Reimão experiments in other media as well, and some of her enigmatic creations have been further transformed off of the watercolor page, turning into three-dimensional sculptures, puppets, and film characters.
Animals also abound in the work of Hannah Ward. The artist makes use of the light paper beneath her colors to capture the glowing face of a deer or the lit spine of a wolf. She lets the pigment run freely from the finely rendered bodies of slain game to depict the blood that streams from them, thereby heightening the violence that is otherwise more quietly implied in their representations (page 166).
Another animal, a bleating deer, commands attention in one of Paolo Terdich’s watercolor compositions. This image, among others of the artist’s lush and colorful works, demonstrates a layering effect that can be achieved in watercolor to reproduce highly realistic works. A series of Terdich’s works, Waters, comprises paintings of swimmers in light-splattered water made in oil, acrylic, and watercolor, effectively showing how the three media can provide similar representation.
Jane Mount has also created a menagerie in her watercolor depictions. In her series 26 Animals!, she imbues some famous animals with human traits: the tiger, Ming, moves from his Harlem apartment to live on a farm in Ohio; the space dog, Laika, views the earth from Sputnik II and finds it beautiful. A separate painting, 132 Birds Leaving the AMNH (pages 82–83), readily harks back to the work of Audubon, showing that watercolor is still a viable means of depicting the natural world with new lustrous colors.
Dear Hancock’s worktable
Danny Gregory also uses watercolor to create series of detailed artworks, most notably in his “illustrated journals,” some of which have been turned into published books. Drawing from the tradition of illuminated manuscripts, Gregory’s journals find transcendence in the everyday world around him, which is easily reflected in the versatility and “go anywhere” aspect of watercolor. Following loosely the monks’ traditions, he ornaments his pages with titles, words, sidebars, and other design devices.
Because the watercolorist can turn to his or her tools so easily, the everyday is a common theme, found in many of the works in this book. Becca Stadtlander paints an overgrown garden, dinner seen through a restaurant window, a cozy salon, and a field of goats. The medium, with its small brushes, enables both the simplicity and the detail that her paintings exemplify. Recently her art, which adopts themes of domestic life, has appropriately been showcased on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
One can almost imagine stepping out of Becca Stadtlander’s painted parlor into the corridors depicted in Tamara Thomsen’s artworks. Thomsen’s rooms, as well as her landscapes, give the viewer the perspective of being fully immersed in their spaces—in fact, her watercolors are unusually large, some nearly wall-sized. They further evoke the palette and sparseness of a van Gogh painting—the post-Impressionist painter also worked in watercolor and created many distinctive works less textured than the oil paintings that most associate with his œuvre.
It is likewise easy to picture Anna Emilia Laitinen bent over her paints and papers as she creates her intimate and fastidious works. Like some of the other artists collected here who depict metamorphoses of persons to animals and animals to persons, perhaps as a means to reconnect with a lost nature, she makes similar transformations between interiors and exteriors, including a forest tearoom, a birch village, and an island bed. The delicacy of watercolor, which can enable a feather-softness in its execution, is well suited to Laitinen’s subjects and themes. She has even used melancholy thistle flowers as paintbrushes.
Dear Hancock, a husband-and-wife team, has extended the intimacy of watercolor into a business of paper goods, including greeting cards, prints, and other stationery items. Written letters, similar to watercolor art, are about the work of the hand, which sometimes seems lost in an age of technology and mechanical reproduction. Handmade watercolor cards have long been made by children, valentines, and artists alike; and Dear Hancock, like many other contemporary art businesses, has made its artistry available to those who also wish to retain the quality of the hand in the art of written correspondence. The image Creative Workstation details the watercolor artist at work, complete with palette, mixing tray, and brushes (page 27).
Fabrice Moireau has created cityscapes and country landscapes from life with a surprising intimacy that we usually associate with interior depictions. He has painted Rome, Paris, Provence, Venice, and other locales; and his sketchbooks, some of which have been published, capture these places with both acuity and heart. His buildings and scenes are often, although not always, without human occupants, and yet they feel welcoming and embracing. It is as though the human presence is not far, somewhere receiving the signals from the antennae of his Paris rooftops, or just behind a drawn curtain in a window of one of the mansard-roofed buildings. Moireau’s paintings even evoke those senses that cannot be captured in the painted composition: voices in the distance, food fragrances wafting from café doorways, lovers kissing somewhere. Or perhaps the human is felt in the gestures of his brushwork and the raw, handmade quality of watercolor.
Watercolor may also show less of an artist’s hand, as Amy Park’s work documents. Her paintings of architecture, like many of Fabrice Moireau’s, are devoid of humans, but with differing effect. Her hard-edged, industrial buildings with façades of duplicating windows or mirrors record spaces made and inhabited by humans, but none of the human softness is found. Her buildings are gigantic, omnipotent; stacks of bricks and balconies seem never-ending. In her work, the architects Alvar Aalto and Oscar Niemeyer are present, but the painter Edward Hopper is present as well, in scenes of urban loneliness. Park’s work appears abstract in the way she determines the crops and distances of her compositions; her great buildings merge, even disappear, into repeating patterns and color formations.
Patterns and color formations frolic in John Norman Stewart’s abstract watercolors. The painter, who also works in a representational mode depicting landscapes, seems to have broken down the shapes and colors of the land and sky into these abstractions that, unlike the seemingly immutable landscapes, appear to be in perpetual motion. As Stewart is a musician as well as a painter, it is not surprising to note in his work similarities with that of Kandinsky, who strived to depict music in some of his abstract paintings.
Jenny Vorwaller’s painting Chance documents how the watercolor medium’s random nature can be utilized to create, with an artist’s thoughtful intervention, evolved compositions (page 162). Vorwaller builds out of the random parts of this painting a vibrant image that resembles color bursts or a bouquet of flowers. In another of her paintings, Reflection, the subject is more defined, but aspects of abstraction and a bit of chance are still employed (page 160).
José Seligson has created his often abstract watercolors using unorthodox tools such as spray bottles and syringes, and he has experimented with nonporous paper, unusual for watercolor, which more commonly soaks into a dense, textured paper made for such purpose. In his paintings, blocks of paint become quilt squares and long sinewy drips become blood streams; a collagelike effect of layered and painted colors is titled Traffic (pages 126–127). With his metaphors and paint applications, Seligson allows many of his watercolors to become works of art out of their own seemingly transformative happenings.
Watercolor today draws from its rich history to create a postmodern cacophony of diverse themes, processes, and images. In our historical present, the drips and spills of watercolor have run into multifaceted abstract and representational images, each artist moving his or her paintbrush to depict each’s own iconography and reality, be it documentary in nature or imagined.
Looking through the lens that is our twenty-first-century moment, these artists reflect and transmute the world around them, touching upon historical precedents and twisting and turning those traditions into new visual vocabularies that evoke a vivid and freshly made present. In the end they collectively offer a prism of light and bright, of pigmented washes both transparent and opaque and simple and layered. Their ideas, processes, and articulations evidence the many possibilities of what occurs when water and color are brought together.
Watercolor spots by Samantha Hahn