Find Evocative Atmosphere in Watercolor

By the beginning of the 19th century watercolor was ready for prime time. Girtin, Constable, Turner and others had experimented with  myriad effects, perspective, erasable surfaces, spontaneity, and glazing as if in oil. They had pretreated surfaces, pre-colored them, and varnished them later. They had used chalk, knives, gouache and oil on and below their  watercolor surfaces.  More than a century later Fairfield Porter summed up their  efforts, especially Turners,  when he advised artists to “Eliminate the important and, keep the essential”.  They  aimed to have their oils imitate the luminance, the freedom, and the atmospherics of their watercolor studies.  Turner’s late interiors reveal the effects of distillation, atmospherics, and  layered glazes. Here are two examples (1 and 2). The first example is a small watercolor with white gouache, a Venetian wine cellar. The second is one of his Interiors for Petworth.

example1.

example2.

The following two examples ( 3 and 4) of mine show the use of a minimal tonal palette. Like Turner I use opaque white tinted lightly with color as an over-glaze  and,  to develop a chiaroscuro derived sense of space.  Both images are architecturally inspired by spaces I discovered in Rome.  The idea of time-past floating like a semi-translucent film over the space, dissolving the present into a memory  came to me as I watched the paint melt and blur acute edges.

example3.

example4.

The next example uses a bright contrast of value and color. The notes are sharp and complementary. The taste in contemporary art now embraces a broad  range from bright and sharp to soft and blended. In example  5 you see the monochromatic  luminosity of transparent red oxide. It awaits  its modification by the introduction of two blues, cyan and ultramarine in example 6 (example shows  the palette alongside with Ultramarine blue, cyan blue, gamboge yellow, and carmine red).  They  help to fortify color by their  simultaneous contrast  with the yellow-brown and, they help create a push/pull sensation which builds a feeling of  greater space, greater depth in the painting.

example 5.

example 6.

The concluding examples (7, 8, 9, 10) are a step by step series demonstrating my quest for a satisfying  unified and distilled presence to the watercolor. I begin by laying in yellow then,  I quickly add the complementary color violet ( example 8).  These two colors make each other stronger through simultaneous contrast effects. I then begin to add too much in example 9. Here, I added more features, more stuff, more color; it’s just too much.  I needed to simplify, distill, reduce and unify. With this new clarified intention I proceeded to example 10.

example 7.

example 8.

example 9.

example 10.