Watercolor Painting: A Comprehensive Approach to Mastering the Medium (5 page)
Read Watercolor Painting: A Comprehensive Approach to Mastering the Medium Online
Authors: Tom Hoffmann
TOM HOFFMANN,
UNDER THE BRIDGE,
1990
WATERCOLOR ON RIVES BFK PAPER
28 × 20 INCHES (71 × 51 CM)
The red building in the background on the right is treated so simply that it looks like a single giant brick, with windows. It is not meant to stand out in the big picture, and indicating individual bricks would have been distracting.
EMIL KOSA JR.,
MOORE HILL, LOS ANGELES,
1940
WATERCOLOR ON ROUGH PAPER
22½ × 30 INCHES (57 × 76 CM)
COURTESY OF
CALIFORNIAWATERCOLOR.COM
The buildings in this scene are all far enough back in the pictorial space that we do not expect to see much detail. With no reason to call attention to any particular building, Emil Kosa Jr. stops well short of describing information as specific as individual bricks. Notice, though, that the granulation of his washes in the tall building toward the left suggests texture well enough for
us
to provide the bricks.
HAROLD GRETZNER,
CHINATOWN STREET CORNER,
circa 1950s
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER
18 × 24 INCHES (46 × 61 CM)
COURTESY OF
CALIFORNIAWATERCOLOR.COM
Harold Gretzner also chose not to make individual bricks. Instead, he dragged a damp brush across the ridges of the dry, rough paper to imply a texture, inviting the viewer to meet him halfway. This second layer represents a further step toward complexity than Kosa took with his granulating washes.
HARDIE GRAMATKY,
VIEW FROM THE ROOF, NEW YORK,
1937
WATERCOLOR ON ROUGH PAPER
14 × 21 INCHES (36 × 53 CM)
COURTESY OF
CALIFORNIAWATERCOLOR.COM
Hardie Gramatky goes one step further. His second layer of tiny rectangles leaves no room for misinterpretation. A brick is a brick, and it takes only a dozen of them to suggest that these are what make up the entire wall.
GEORGE POST,
CABLE CROSSING
DATE UNKNOWN
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER 14½ × 17½ INCHES (37 × 44 CM)
COURTESY OF
CALIFORNIAWATERCOLOR.COM
George Post enjoyed using patterns to refer to texture. He shows specific bricks only on the shady side of his blue-eyed building, but their presence does as much as the shadow to show that there is a change of planes.
OGDEN PLEISSNER,
OLD MILL, WINCHENDON, MASSACHUSETTS,
CIRCA 1960
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER 16 × 26 INCHES (41 × 66 CM)
COURTESY OF ADELSON GALLERIES, NEW YORK
After a lengthy search for a richly detailed treatment of a brick wall, I was delighted to find one that provides lots of specific information without overdoing it. Ogden Pleissner is very conscious of how much detail a given surface can carry. The sunlit wall of the smaller brick building, with its single window, has plenty of room for individual bricks. The sunlit wall of the big building, however, is already chock-full of windows, shadows, and stains, and it would be overloaded if it had a brick pattern as well.
NOWING
W
HEN TO
S
TOP
No matter where your personal preferences take you, some level of restraint is required to keep the painting from getting overloaded. There is simply too much information to ever cram it all into one painting. Even if I had the patience to paint all the bricks, all the mortar, and the shadows each brick casts, I wouldn’t want to. People do try, but the paintings that result are rarely the ones I enjoy looking at. Personally, I need to know when I have given the viewer just enough information, and not too much. At some level of my thinking, I am always asking:
Is this enough?
A painting is a conversation. Both parties—the artist and the viewer—have roles to play. When one does all the talking, it leaves the other with nothing to do. Part of the pleasure of a conversation is the mutual acknowledgement of common understanding. A well-chosen word refers to ideas and experiences that both participants appreciate, whereas describing
everything
implies that the other person has nothing to offer. Paintings that tell me too much always feel vaguely insulting, as if all that is wanted from me is to be impressed and say, “Wow!”
There is another element that bears consideration in the question of how much information is enough. It is easy to get all wrapped up in the portrayal of specifics and forget to be respectful of the paint. The transparency and fluid nature of watercolor is what attracts most of us to the medium in the first place, and to me nothing is more important than giving the watercolor room to display its tendency to flow. If I sacrifice the simple beauty of the paint for accuracy or complexity, I have made a bad bargain.
Any time I become engrossed in depicting detail, I want to take ever greater control of where the paint will go. If I could stand back and observe my own posture, I’d see a figure hunched over the paper, holding the brush way down on the ferrule, moving only the last joint of his fingers. This is not the guy who paints the kind of pictures I enjoy.
The fussier I am about what happens on the paper, the more I’m inclined to think that what I’ve just done is not right. Correcting watercolor is always a dicey proposition. Some people become very good at it, but rather than practice how to rescue my paintings, I prefer to develop the skills that will help me not make the mistake in the first place. That means giving as much of the control as possible back to the paint. If I can establish the range of brushwork that I know will do the job, then I can make my mark with confidence and leave it alone, just as Maurice Logan has done with the stack of logs in the image opposite.
Looking at a painting we admire, it is natural to assume that the artist meant for everything to be just as we see it. Quite often, though, having made the important choices in advance, he only needed to know
roughly
how the paint would behave.
I would define the
ideal painting as one that has nothing missing, and not a single extra
stroke. If the paint shows signs of having been messed with, the implication is that at some point one of those criteria was not met. Boldly applied paint, on the other hand, convinces us that everything is as it should be. Only the artist knows if everything at the original scene has really been represented, but with watercolor, every talented viewer can detect uncertainty.
The paintings in this book come from all over the world and from three different centuries. The common denominators are the confidence with which the paint was applied and the artist’s respect for the medium.
MAURICE LOGAN,
THE CHICKEN HOUSE
DATE UNKNOWN
WATERCOLOR ON COLD PRESS PAPER 20 × 26 INCHES (51 × 66 CM)
COURTESY OF
CALIFORNIAWATERCOLOR.COM
In this down-home subject, Maurice Logan seemed to want a casual feeling, as if the paint just slid into place by itself. With the stacked logs on the right, for example, he knew the overall shape needed to be roughly half light and half mid-value, and that the strokes needed to be horizontal. It is possible to imagine other combinations of similar strokes that would do the job equally well, but these are “perfect enough.”
TOM HOFFMANN,
BEND
, 2011
WATERCOLOR ON ARCHES HOT PRESS PAPER
15 × 22 INCHES (38 × 56 CM)
In this painting the major shapes were blocked in with large, general washes. Notice how the sharp edge between the two green bushes on the left and the darker shadows behind them does the important work of locating the shapes in space, but it was not until late in the painting process that the edge was established. Before the shadow layer was applied, the hill behind the bushes was as light as the sunlight hills on the right.
