From Watercolor to Oil

Turner and Cezanne, two of our greatest landscape painters, both discovered the luminous, liquid plasticity of watercolor and then, tried to develop their oils to offer a similar sense of their watercolors’ incandescence, plasticity of form and ambiguous suggestion.  Translucent watercolor laying on a white ground allows the reflectance of the white ground to amplify chromatic luminosity. Colors feel light and atmospheric in watercolor. Both Turner and Cezanne thinned their oils to the point of glazes to capture that sensation. They both increased this effort toward the end of their careers.  Later, I will show you examples comparing their late watercolors and oils .  But today, I want to show you how I have tried to transfer some  ideas I discovered in my initial watercolor of a subject into new ideas for painting the same subject in oil. Some colors like ultramarine blue have a different color identity when mixed with either a gum arabic(watercolor) binder or an oil binder. The drips dry in different patters( see example #1).  Oils are bettter suited to blending color with seamless transitions( see example  #2). The faster drying watercolor allows more spontaneity in fast effects and gestures while the slower drying oils  ( especially if saturated with oil) will continue to alter their shape after the artist’s departure from the  canvas.       In my next example( #3)  I present  a watercolor and an oil of Prouts Neck, Maine, the home studio  base for Winslow Homer,  I have more graphic or, shape driven effects in the watercolor than the oil.  I alter the palette in the oil by going with more yellow versus the watercolor in which I used more violet and red-brown.  You can  see that the colors and edges of the shapes are more blended in the oil ( example #4).  In both paintings I used ultramarine blue, titanium white, carmine, gamboge yellow(Old Holland) and scheveningen blue light(old Holland) and, transparent red oxide.  Principally, I used transparent colors in both the oil and watercolor to exploit the reflectant property of the native white of the paper or linen.  Each Prouts Neck painting received about 45 minutes paint time.  The example #1 above received only a few minutes ( two or three) as I chased a spontaneous set of effects while the subsequent oil (example #2) received  20 or 30 minutes. In the Prouts Neck watercolor I pretreated the surface of the paper (hot press 300 lb. Fabriano Artistico) with acrylic gloss varnish to keep the colors from sinking in.  Either wet or dry, the colors appear to have the same intensity when I  pretreat the  surface as earlier English 19th century watercolorists discovered.