2020 rocks and water watercolor, 14x17”
3:24 PM: i/we thought this hunkering down period was going to be a huge gift. but since it began 3-4 days ago, i haven’t been able to do any decent work, or very much work at all. i’ve been wandering around my studio like a lost soul, looking here & there for clues as to what i should/could be doing, yesterday i did such god-awful work on il torrente that i just deleted yesterdays blog post; something i’ve never done before.
so finally, after paying some bills and wandering around some more, i found two blocks of watercolor paper and started a watercolor of rocks & water.
a novel thing to paint, eh?
based upon the mood i’m in right now, i may just continue making rocks & water watercolors until the weather permits my first forays to paint plein air at the creek, which has never failed to put wind in my sails.
what got me going finally was the text of a book i have on cézanne’s watercolors. the descriptions were so graphic and beautifully written that it reminded me of the pleasure i take in making watercolors, which i haven’t done in a while. in my wanderings today i came across this 14x17” block of watercolor paper, with a nice smooth surface, just the way i like it. what was interesting to me about the cézanne text was his description of how his pencil marks and very light watercolor marks are interdependent, and how cézanne plays them off against one another in a unique way. that appeals tremendously to my sensibilities, and is how i’ve used watercolor going all the way back to my greek period plein air paintings.
the one you see on the right is not a perfect example of this pencil/watercolor technique, but it was handy, hanging as it does in our bedroom. it’s a 2005 watercolor of pithara, a waterfall in the hills of the cycladic island of andros, greece.