30 Watercolor artist | APRIL 2019
bowl of candy. Th at was the spark of inspiration behind
artist Ali Cavanaugh’s recent “Chroma” series, featuring
portraits painted in bold, largely monochromatic color.
“I was brainstorming ideas for a 2018 show in Palm
Springs,” she says, “and I kept thinking, ‘bowl of candy.’
I wanted to have a whole wall of diff erent-colored faces.”
Cavanaugh created 25 paintings for the series. Th e
subjects are all people the artist knows personally. She wanted to explore portraying
them, she says, “with a deep sense of awareness, intellect and conscientiousness.”
Her color choices began simply by pulling out some of her favorite tubes of
paint—some old favorites and some new. “I devoted each painting to a color,” she
says, “and each painting was a separate experiment in learning the capabilities of
that individual color. I used gravity and lots of water to create sweeps of color with
smooth gradients.”
The looser, abstract areas of these portraits provide plenty of room for play and
experimentation, which keeps each painting fresh and a bit unpredictable.
“Sometimes I start with abstraction, and sometimes I start with rendering the
face,” she says. “It depends on the painting. Each one is a little diff erent, because
I try to remain open to the process.”In her “Immerse” series, painted
between 2015 and 2016,
Cavanaugh focused on babies
and small children as subjects,
using light and airy color. “I used a
lot of turquoise and viridian to
create the feeling of a dream or
another world,” she says. Looking
Through to You (watercolor on
clay panel, 11x14) was a reversal of
that cool palette. “I thought, ‘What
would happen if I fl ipped the
palette to warm red? Would it
change the dream feeling?’” the
artist recalls. “Most of my work
comes out of this sort of curiosity.”