Watercolor Artist

From a sailboat on the high sea to the crash of water on rocks, the sea and shore are settings that offer painters an abundance of creative possibilities. For watercolor artists—who are so well acquainted with the power and flow of water—the attraction is perhaps a natural one. “ The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.”—JACQUES COUSTEAU For this issue, we visited with several artists for whom the call of the sea is powerful. For artist Geoff Allen, it’s the docks and busy shipyards along the California coast that inspire his complex compositions (page 24). For Poppy Balsar, of Nova Scotia, it’s the beautiful shores along the Bay of Fundy that act as muse (page 34). “I enjoy simply watching water move—the waves coming…

Watercolor was the right medium for this book because it’s common to both Western art and traditional Chinese art, and I used several techniques that Chinese painters use. In Chinese landscapes, mountains are often painted with soft washes so that they appear to be emerging from clouds and mist. This gives them a dreamlike quality. I thought this would be a nice way to represent the theme of memory that runs throughout the book, so I utilized soft washes and lost edges in the paintings. In Chinese bamboo paintings, an artist paints each part of the plant—stalk segments, stems and leaves—with single brushstrokes. The bamboo is depicted in silhouette, and distance is conveyed by modulating the value of the ink. I incorporated this approach into the illustrations of corn stalks in…

STUDIO STAPLES Custom Watercolor Sketchbook [$36] If you’d love to create a customized sketchbook, check out the Lake Michigan Book Press, in Kalmazoo, Mich., where you can work with book artist Crystal Shaulis. The sketchbooks lie flat and come with five paper choices, in three sizes, with eight thread colors and seven cover colors. You can add a back pocket or more pages. Shaulis is an instructor at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center and has had her artist books exhibited at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, University of Nebraska and the Muskegon Museum of Art.ETSY.COM/SHOP/LKMICHIGANBOOKPRESS Credit Card Watercolor Palette [$13] Measuring just over 3½ inches in length, this pocket-sized aluminum palette comes with a 3D-printed insert of 4, 10 or 18 paint wells, a watercolor paper card, which fits inside the cover, and a…

The sometimes strange and often shocking world of fine art sales can feel like a separate sphere altogether from the role of an artist at the easel, but auction results can provide some insight into the changing trends. Art supply sales have spiked in the age of Covid-19, as more and more people discover painting and other creative outlets, and the same is true for the world of art collecting. When the folk art collection of Peter and Barbara Goodman, for example, was sold at a Christie’s auction in January of this year, many sales records were broken. Among them was the selling price for a watercolor painting by Jacob Maentel, Pair of Portraits of Husband and Wife, which realized $562,500. In an interview with Antiques and The Arts Weekly, John…

The family estate of watercolor artist Chiura Obata’s has gifted 35 of his paintings, made between 1934 and 1943, to the Utah Museum of Fine Art (UMFA). Utah became a place of deep and somber significance for the Obata family after the artist was forced into the the Topaz Internment Camp, which was located in central Utah, during World War II. During his internment, Obata founded an art school and taught children and adults how to paint, even organizing an exhibition at the camp. This experience would continue to impact the artist’s work throughout his life, but he also felt deeply connected to nature, and had even immigrated to America in search of what he called “Great Nature.” Both of these topics are explored in the works gifted to the…

I began my professional life as an architectural illustrator. The subject of my artwork would be whatever structure I was assigned to depict, and it would always be positioned in the center of the picture plane. The closing of this career, in 2010, happened to coincide with a visit to the copper mining ruins of the Keweenaw Peninsula, in Michigan. There, I found exciting subjects that inspired me to start painting in watercolor (see Quincy Dredge Interior in Summer, above). As an illustrator, I’d had my fill of conventional straight-on compositions—what I think of as “portraits,” although my subjects are typically structures or machines. With the freedom to change my point of view, I moved closer to my subjects. Turns out this created a dynamic, encompassing atmosphere that I found exciting.…