Watercolor Painting: A Comprehensive Approach to Mastering the Medium (4 page)

I haven’t forgotten about those intangible qualities of silence and dignity. One reason I prefer painting from life to working from photos is that the feeling of a place is much more likely to be present in my on-site work. It is also more fun than being in the studio. Who wouldn’t rather be actually sitting in that courtyard in Oaxaca than in my former garage?

This is not to say that studio paintings can’t ever carry a good sense of the location. To some extent feelings such as dignity or silence can be understood in terms of watercolor variables. Adjusting color, value, wetness, and composition will certainly affect the mood of a picture. Many possible variations can be explored with a quick sketch or study, and some can be evaluated simply by imagining them. It is useful to consider, for example, how turning your paper horizontal or vertical would change the overall feeling of the page.

In general, though, I believe that the “spirit of place” we value so highly cannot entirely be put into a painting by design. No amount of analysis or planning will ensure that looking at the painting will
feel
like being there. When that does happen it is more a matter of the painter having been fully present in the place and not preoccupied by self-concern.

Maybe this is why the word
capture
makes me cringe when it is applied to painting. You’ve heard it, I’m sure: “The artist
captures
the moment in watercolor …” “The fleeting light is
captured
forever …” “The subject’s personality is
captured
in a few swift strokes …” Captured, tortured, and held for ransom. What are we, pirates? I prefer to think of painting as an act of
translation,
a much more civilized activity.

Once the subject has presented itself and I have made a sketch or study, I have a pretty good sense of how the painting will proceed. I don’t mean that I can see the finished product perfectly in my mind’s eye. That would require too much control, and I hope to leave plenty of room for the paint to assert its fluidity.

The moment of beginning a new painting is thrilling. I am always enthusiastic and eager to start. But, in fact, I am not always really prepared. Sometimes I don’t yet truly understand the subject in watercolor terms. If I take a minute to honestly assess my readiness, I can often see where I have been glossing over some tricky parts. Ideally, once I get started I want the painting to flow along without too many interruptions. But when I come to a part I’ve only been pretending to understand, the whole show grinds to a halt. Then I have to shift into a more analytical mode—thinking with my brush—which usually creates a very different look from the fluid momentum of the rest of the page. That initial enthusiasm is an important resource I don’t want to waste, but neither do I want to let false confidence lead me too far out on a limb.

It’s all about balance. Painting in watercolor is a high-wire act, with balance always foremost. Form and content, risk and control, spontaneity and planning, detachment and engagement—stroke by stroke we gauge the status of the equilibrium we seek. To find the balance between careful and carefree, then, I ask myself:
What looks tricky?
Once I’ve conceded that I may still have some preparation to do, the answer is usually obvious.

Sometimes looking for the tricky parts right away helps me know which type of study I should start with. For example, in the scene from southern Utah, shown in the image opposite, I liked the sweep of the land as it went around the bend in the river, but when I squinted at the vista the space flattened out. This is because, with the exception of the sunlit butte and the sky, all the shapes were the same value. In addition, all that texture made it hard to see how the big shapes relate. I needed to deliberately oversimplify the scene. I decided that a sketch that treats the major shapes as simple washes should clarify what would work.

Evaluate the subject, and home in on the tricky parts before you start to paint.
Carefully studying my scene, I determine that I need to separate the foreground shape from the middle and background forms to make sure the full depth is apparent. If I lighten the foreground a bit, will that make enough of a difference? Or do I need to adjust the color as well?

Focus on the aspects that provide answers to your questions.
With much of the texture eliminated, it is easier to see how the major shapes relate. Increasing the color difference between the foreground and the middle ground improves the feeling of depth.

In my initial sketch, as shown above, I meant to make it much simpler, but I couldn’t resist adding some stripes. The temptation to make every piece of paper into a “winner” is powerful, but a sketch or a study is only meant to help you understand what needs to be true in the finished painting. Here, some of what I hoped to learn is obscured by my desire to make the sketch look good.

My second sketch, shown opposite, was more successful. Its simplicity it helped me articulate the formal elements and better see what still needed to be finessed for the final painting. Comparing two sketches can be very useful. Notice the different treatment of the arm of the middle shape as it slants upward along the top of the foreground. It was too insistent in the first sketch, so I tried making it lighter in the second. Both sketches reveal that the composition feels cramped and would work better if more of the river was visible.

Refine your vision.
This version is easier to read than the first. I can see that the edge between the foreground and middle-ground shapes needs to be emphasized. With a clear, hard edge there, color and value differences between the foreground and the middle can be subtle. The foreground needs additional information, but not as much as in the fancy first sketch.

JONATHAN JANSON,
SNOW, MARYSVILLE,
2008
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER
14½ × 22 INCHES (37 × 56 CM)

The sky in this elegant composition is a very smooth wash that must have been applied with a big, wet brush. The tree on the right is a potent dark with a complex profile. I can’t imagine painting
around
the tree, and I would have been nervous about letting the wash brush flow across it. Painting the tree as a second layer after the sky is dry seems to be the only way to go.

Watercolor painters are always thinking about how what they are doing now will affect their options later on. Choices you make in the early stages of a
painting can close doors permanently, so it is essential to consider the first step in terms of the freedom it will allow. Remember to be thinking a couple of layers ahead of yourself when you ask:
Where do I begin?

My watercolors usually develop from light to dark, a
progression that is suggested by the transparency of the medium. Darks cover lights more easily than the reverse. Some painters like to get the darkest darks down right from the start, so they can see where things fit within the total value range. I see the wisdom of this, but broad washes usually precede small, dark strokes, and I want to avoid laying a fluid wash over a strong dark, to prevent the dark from running.

Making a preliminary
value study is always a good way to learn what I need to know about the darks—such as how dark they need to be, or how many of them really belong in the picture. In a study it seems fine to put the darks in whenever, since the only goal is to learn what needs to be true. If they run a bit when I apply a wash over them, it doesn’t matter, since this is not a painting. When I am ready to begin a proper painting, I know the role of the darks well enough to suspend them in my mind until the picture is ready to receive them gracefully.

The
light-to-dark progression works best for me, but if you can work around the darks, put them in whenever you want. The two different approaches will be with us as long as people paint in watercolor, which demonstrates the primary rule of making art: Do what works. (The Dalai Lama recommends this, too, in perhaps a broader sense.)

Proceeding from general toward specific is another progression that plays an essential part in determining how I begin a painting, as well as when I stop. For me, it is even more important for a watercolor to proceed from
general to specific than from light to dark. I’ll explain what I mean.

Generally speaking, a brick wall is a red rectangle. This is its fundamental visual reality. Specifically, it is made of a great many individual red rectangles. How much of the specific information you choose to include in your painting is a matter of personal style and the role the wall plays in the big picture. A big red rectangle may turn out to be all the information you need, or you may want to suggest the texture of the individual bricks without actually delineating any of them. One artist might choose to include just a few scattered bricks, while another might not stop until every brick is visible. No matter how fully you want to describe the wall, it makes sense to begin by thinking in the most general terms. First, establish the simplest form of the subject, and then you are free to add information
incrementally,
stopping before you overload the picture.

In the images that appear on the following pages the artists have represented
brick walls with varying degrees of specificity.

In each of these city scenes, the brick buildings began as simple washes, affording the artists the opportunity to add as little or as much texture as they wanted. Having different purposes and different styles, they all stopped at different points, but no one put in nearly as many bricks as they could actually see. Why not?