Designing Translucence

You and  have learned to look into the ambiguous confusion of water and easily accept its varieties of abstraction. We have learned to see undulating abstract rhythms as a recognizable feature of water. Water has become a launching pad for artists’ experiments in abstraction. Water offers translucence, shadows, reflections, blurred motion, sparkle, ambiguous depth, ambiguous objects, varieties of illumination, theatrical exaggeration, and a subtext of vitality and fertility.  All these qualities need not arrive in a single picture, but it’s fun to try. When Andrew Wyeth experimented with watercolor he could let dark smearing stains of watercolor trigger ideas for narration. An abstract pool of uncertainty needed only an articulated leaf edge or a ruffled horizon to trigger the viewer’s recognition that the subject must be water ( example 1).

John Singer Sargent followed a similar path. He, like Wyeth, began with simple curving composition with a high horizon which lowered the viewer to the surface of the water (example 2). After setting the compositional structure an artist like Wyeth can allow the paint to flow in loose large areas then apply a few darkened shadow edges and voila. The effect appears complex but, the process is simple.

example 1. Wyeth watercolor sketch.

example 2. Sargent watercolor sketch.

Here are a series of steps using oil on aluminum pursuing translucence and opacity as Sargent and Wyeth used watercolor.  Example 3 presents my photo after a few adjustments in Photoshop. It contains some elements which I initially borrowed but, as you will see they sabotaged my design and required changing. In my initial  design drawing (example 4) I have structural lines of the composition; a high horizon with a meandering triangle from the bottom with darkened side triangles pointing into the composition, and a  reflective band of sunlight.

example 3. photograph.

example 4. composition design for painting.

My palette initially has only gamboge yellow and ultramarine blue and a touch of carmine lake. I lay in large areas without regard to edges.  I already can sense the composition here (example 5). I applied the paint with a flat 8″ soft synthetic flat brush.  Next (example 6) I  extract paint by  very lightly teasing the surface with  the same 8″ flat and a 4″ and a 2″ synthetic soft flat (watercolor wash style brushes). My gentle brushstrokes find a subtle fluttering of the horizontal stream bed  as well as the angles  of the banked hillside and stream bank.

example 5.  the edgeless lay-in.

example 6. discovering light and texture.

Finally, I add opaque pastel color as highlights on rocks and as solid  areas of sunlight in the upper territory (example 7).  Here’s where I make a misstep. I trust the photo’s suggestion that I use three equidistant highlighted rocks in the foreground.  Their arrangement is suspiciously regular. I remove the middle highlighted rock and create a small aggregation of highlighted rocks along  the lonely larger one in the center right. I  invent a pattern of submerged and overlapping rocks in the area of the  excised, previously highlighted, middle rock. This new arrangement is less suspicious and less overtly regular (example 8).

example 7. Suspicious highlighted triple rock arrangement.

example 8. New arrangement with less regularity.