Watercolor Painting: A Comprehensive Approach to Mastering the Medium (6 page)

Sometimes the sheer pleasure of making
brushstrokes can lead to an overloaded
painting. I often see students repeating a stroke over and over, as if they are biding time while they wait for inspiration. Part of what’s going on is that we
want
to keep adding more. We came to paint, after all, and it just plain feels good to swing the brush (until we notice that we’ve overdone it again). This is why it is important to ask:
Are my marks intentional?

There are stages in the progress of a painting when it’s fine to indulge in the sensual pleasure of moving the brush over the paper, but there comes a moment when it’s wise to detach and perhaps slow down.

Given the dual
progression of light toward dark and general toward specific, the first layer of a painting is often composed of the big shapes, blocked in with pale washes. Successive layers of middle values and darks will eventually cover much of the paint you apply at this stage, which may allow for casual brushwork. As the middle values begin to go on, however, and certainly when you get to the individual, very specific dark strokes, a different quality of attention is called for.

When the first layer of the painting at left was being applied, it was not important for me to contain the pale washes within their respective outlines. The marks could be made casually, since the second and third layers—shadows, shrubs, and rocks—would be dark enough to cover any overflow. If you follow the hard edge between foreground and background, you can see that one or the other is almost always deliberately darker.

The more specific the marks you are making, the more you benefit from a kind of “detached engagement.” While painting make sure to pause and ask:
Is this okay?
I think of this process as watching the painting develop stroke by stroke, as if someone else were painting it. If you were actually looking over another artist’s shoulder it would be easy to know when to say “Hold it! That’s fine just as it is.” Being deep into your own agenda, though, can blind you to what is right before your eyes.

The trick is to be separated from your own intentions enough to see whether what you’ve just done
works,
regardless of whether it conforms to your original vision. It is always possible that what is happening in the moment might be just fine, even if it’s not what you thought you wanted. Remembering to ask if the job is already done saves many pictures from becoming overpainted.

If you still decide it’s not right, before you rush to correct it, ask yourself what is the
minimum
you could do to take it further. For example, if a hill in the distance feels too prominent, it is less invasive to change its color with a simple glaze than it would be to try to scrub it out entirely. If something about your painting bothers you, at least
consider
learning to love it. Doing nothing, after all, is the absolute minimum. Being suspicious of my immediate agenda, and knowing that I usually lose more than I gain by going back over a spot to “fix” it, I’m inclined to wait and see how it looks tomorrow.

In short, be flexible, and avoid “painting yourself into a corner.” The transparency of watercolor demands that we hold off on getting very specific prematurely. That’s the logic behind a light-to-dark and
general-to-specific progression. By not committing to brushwork that is difficult to change cleanly, we keep our range of choices as open as possible.

With regard to their impact on the painting, there is a hierarchy of the marks you might make. Washes are more general than strokes. Soft edges are less specific than hard ones. Light is easier to cover than dark. Colors that are already present in the painting will be less obtrusive than new ones. You can always add another stroke a week later, if you decide it’s called for, but you can’t always take one away.

One way to keep from getting specific too quickly is to stay abstract as long as possible. For me, this is mainly a matter of how I think about the subject. During the inner dialog that accompanies the painting process, I can describe the image by naming everything in terms of the content, or I can stick to the language of form.

For example, here is a content-based, narrative description of the photo below: This is a street scene in Mexico, late in the day. One side of the street is in sunlight, the other in shadow. A woman carrying shopping bags is crossing the street, while another is standing on the sidewalk. Several cars, some parked, some moving, are in the middle distance. A big tree shows above the sunlit buildings. A mountain in the distance stands out against the clear blue sky.

Here is the same scene described in the language of pure form: The right quarter and the bottom third of the page are rectangles of cool, dark neutral. A triangle comprising warm, very light, rectilinear forms begins at the center of the page and widens toward the left. A pattern of dark verticals is distributed across the triangle. Above it a semicircle of intense medium dark green is silhouetted against a middle-value blue, which fills the entire top left quadrant. Where the triangle and the dark strips converge, a mid-value purple-gray form widens upward, one third of the way into the blue.

How I choose to think about the picture can have a profound effect on the way I begin to paint it. In the early stages of a painting I usually want to establish the general structure of the image, without getting caught up in specificity. The painting has to work first of all as an arrangement of big shapes, and at this level it is more important for the pattern of darks and lights to be strong than for any specific information about content to be present. This is why it is important to ask:
How long can I stay abstract?

Until I have taken care of the fundamental needs of the painting, I don’t have sufficient basis for deciding how much information to include. It is easy to get involved in the proportions of the woman crossing the street, for example, and lose track of the fact that she is primarily part of a big shadow. If I were actually standing in the scene, I would be aware of the figures, but I would probably not be studying them in any detail. In the painting, I want the elements of the picture to have an emotional presence similar to the actual experience, which is not necessarily the same thing as seeing them in a photograph.

Photos exert a powerful influence. It is easy to assume that the painting will feel right only if I duplicate the photo exactly, especially if I am already thinking of the elements of the picture as people, buildings, cars, and trees. When I am thinking in terms of big, abstract shapes, however, there are no people, no sidewalks, no shopping bags—just a few somewhat darker and lighter strokes within the big shadow. This leaves me free to decide what role I want each part to play.

Opposite is a painting of the scene done from this point of view. The individual components (people, buildings, cars, and trees) are minimally described and, out of context, might be difficult to recognize, but all together add up to a “realistic” interpretation. A content-based approach would have invited all the associations that attend the names of every part of the scene. Like many realist artists, I am susceptible to an imperative to do justice to each subject. I could easily have gotten wrapped up in accurately rendering postures, hairstyles, body parts, and on and on, until the figures had taken on too much importance in the scene.

The vegetation in this photograph can be described either as “a big tree that shows above the sunlit buildings” or as “a semicircle of intense medium green silhouetted against a middle-value blue,” depending upon whether the language of content or the language of form is used.

TOM HOFFMANN,
TINOCO Y PALACIOS,
2010
WATERCOLOR ON ARCHES HOT PRESS PAPER
11 × 15 INCHES (28 × 38 CM)

The figures in the foreground have a presence appropriate to the role they play in the big picture. Thinking abstractly allowed me to stop as soon as I saw that they had done their job.

ALVARO CASTAGNET,
HARBOR BRIDGE, SYDNEY,
2008
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER
26 × 40 INCHES (66 × 102 CM)

The overall effect of Alvaro Castagnet’s interpretation of this everyday scene is one of stunning realism. Looking at the painting shape by shape, however, it becomes clear that he has not indulged in a duplication of photographic detail. Instead, he has selected the relatively few elements of each part of the image that are most telling, and eliminated all the rest. Having learned what
not
to paint, the artist makes his statement without hesitation.

In the early stages of learning about a new subject, we are susceptible to the assumption that if the
painting in progress doesn’t feel quite right, it must need something
more.
Having not yet internalized the basic structure of the image, we look to the photo or the scene to see if there is something we’ve left out. And, of course, there always is. When it still seems wrong, we find another bit to add, and in this way we keep cramming in more and more information, when the real problem may well be that we already have
too much.