54 Watercolor artist | OCTOBER 2019
LEFT
Vortex Nest, II
(watercolor on
paper, 36x36)BELOW
Golden Leaves
(watercolor on
paper, 11x11)until the orange is balanced throughout
the painting. Th en she might mix a
toned-down yellow and repeat the
process, following it with a rust color.
“I observe how the brighter colors look
with the duller colors, and then I might
introduce another bright color, say, a
rose,” she says. “I might decide to revisit
the orange and rose again because I don’t
paint all the orange at once and all the
rose at once.” Once she achieves the bal-
ance and colors of the subject, she adds
the background, most often in a contrast-
ing color to the subject’s dominant colors.
After Nest I, Van Vleck was completed,
Pitts was surprised by how wildly color-
ful and exuberant it was. “I’d never
painted anything quite like this nest,”
she says. “Th ere was something about
it that refreshed my work in a way that
I’d never experienced before.”EVOLVING IDEAS
After Pitts painted several more nests
from life, she was able to create addi-
tional works strictly from memory and
imagination, such as Vortex Nest, II
(above). Many of her series evolve in
this way—from the real to the imagined.
“I can’t put every idea I get into every
painting, so I’ll save them for subse-
quent ones,” she says.
Take Pitts’ tree trunk paintings. Th e
fi rst one the artist painted was a commis-
sion of a real setting featuring a fore-
ground of trees through which a bay and
a distant island can be seen. As Pitts was
painting that scene, she considered other
ways to depict it, and the background
became more mystical and abstract in
subsequent paintings.
In Mystery of Trees I (opposite), for
example, the trees became a screen that
reveals a more distant, experimental
background. “I was trying to paint the
trees so that they looked good together,
but each had a unique personality,” she