28 Watercolor artist | AUGUST 2019
enough of a tooth to provide texture.” He’ll make a 10- or
20-second sketch on the surface to block in the composition.
Th is is deliberately quick to keep the painting fresh and
spontaneous, more like a study than a carefully “fi lled-in”
drawing. He also keeps his marks prominent and gestural.
He then adds a watercolor wash over the entire surface.
“I love the shapes and marks that can be created in water-
color—from big mop washes to the sharp lines of a sword
brush,” the artist says. “I love working quickly and letting
the brush do its own thing.”
After that, his process varies from painting to painting.
Th ere are times when he’ll work solely in watercolor. If
he’s using pastel, the paint usually has to be dry before he
applies it, but even then, the pastel will sometimes get wet
and shift. He’ll scrape it, smudge it, erase it and paint over
it until it looks right, switching regularly from watercolor
to pastel and back again. Sometimes, Bartholomew willeven go over the pastel using a wet brush, reducing the
medium back to a pure pigment.
“Th e soft, diff using eff ect of pastel makes a great
partnership with watercolor, especially when painting
things like sea spray or hazy distant hills,” he says. “I also
like the way that pastels can reintroduce vibrancy to a
picture at any stage. For me, cautiously preventing colors
from getting muddy can sometimes suck the life out of
a painting because it requires that I slow down, so it’s use-
ful to be able to add the strong color later. It’s a careful
balance, but Bartholomew says, “With pastel, I can cover
a multitude of sins.”
Th e combination of watercolor and pastel enables the
artist to experiment and stay fl uid. Since many of his sub-
jects move—seas, skies, animals—he hopes his sweeping
marks convey some of this motion and energy and give the
paintings their vitality.