28 Watercolor artist | JUNE 2020
THE MAGIC OF A MEDIUM
Although it was for pragmatic reasons that I switched to watercolor for travel-
painting—namely, the ease with which I could carry my equipment, and the
speed at which I could work on a painting and then pack it away—the medium
soon became central to my painting life on its own merits. I love the way it
works, its special qualities of versatility, its strength and subtlety, and the fact
that, after 40 years, I still discover new things each and every time I paint.
Both the beauty and the bane of watercolor as a medium is its fl uidity and
transparency. Making a painting in watercolor is like walking a tightrope and
juggling a multitude of balls in the air at the same time. You must mix color,
add the right amount of water, achieve depth of tone, organize the composition,
leave white paper where you want the lightest tones, all while controlling the
drying of the paint—not too fast, not too slow. All this before even considering
the knotty problem of choosing a subject and dealing with the vicissitudes of
changing light and shadow.
I’ve been immensely fortunate to paint in some especially interesting regions
of the world: in China as it started opening up to the West; in Syria just before
the civil war; and in remote corners of India, Zanzibar and Yemen. It’s not
necessary to travel far and wide to paint light and shadow, however. Whether
you’re at home or abroad, the challenge is the same: It’s a matter of seeing and
understanding what’s before you, and then being able to put it down in paint.BOTTOM LEFT
I was enchanted by the many imaginative
designs of gates in Senegal, some made
of little more than sticks and string. It’s the
shadow, however, that this particular gate
cast on the foreground that prompted me
to paint The Stick Gate, Senegal (water-
color on paper, 17x11).BOTTOM RIGHT
In Shadows and Columns, Venice, Italy
(watercolor on paper, 11x7), a back-street
view of a very grand Venetian church,
it’s the shadows that bring drama to
the composition. The chinks of sunlight
between the columns and the buildings
create shadows that converge at a
vanishing point that happens to coincide
with the two tiny fi gures that appeared
while I was painting. They help to give
scale to the monumental portico.