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Modern Watercolor Artists and their Methods

Pablo Picasso: Pablo Picasso, of course, is a prime example of an artist who enjoys every medium that has been invented by painting in oil, tempera, poster color, watercolor and colored inks. He has also, by the way, made and decorated pots, sculptured, etched and lithographed, moving easily from medium to medium with very little effort and a great deal of success.

Inside Picasso's Universe - Watercolor

So much for the idea that you need to confine yourself only to one medium of expression!

John Minton: John Minton was a fine British artist who worked full-time as a painter, illustrator, and teacher of art. He moved from watercolor to oil painting, then to tempera and pen and ink, and was perhaps one of the finest watercolor exponents in England for a long time.

His watercolors, sometimes pure, sometimes not, are a fine example of how to use transparency of the wash, coupled with the lines made by pen and ink. There are some good examples of this kind in book jackets and illustrations.

He painted scenes of Britain, both its attractive countryside and its decayed cities, and later travelled overseas for new subjects. The increasing popularity of abstract painting at the expense of figurative work exacerbated personal problems, leading to his early death in 1957.

Graham Sutherland: Graham Sutherland, British artist who died 1980 in, used gouache to express the mysterious and romantic aspects of the English landscape. And during the last war, as official war artist covering mining, industry and bomb damage, did some superb gouaches of tin mines and bombed London streets.

He did not begin to paint in earnest until he was in his mid-30s, following the collapse of the print market in 1930 due to the Great Depression. Sutherland focused on the inherent strangeness of natural forms, and abstracting them, sometimes giving his work a surrealist appearance; in 1936 he exhibited in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. He also took up glass design, fabric design and poster design during the 1930s, and taught at a number of London art colleges.

Ben Shahn: In America, Ben Shahn's family immigrated to America and settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. Shahn began his path to becoming an artist in New York, where he was first trained as a typographer.

Behold How Good and Pleasant It Is - Watercolor

Shahn's early experiences with typography and graphic design is apparent in his later prints and paintings which often include the combination of text and image.

Ben Shahn was one of the few big artists satisfied to use a small scale and so opt for tempera and poster color. His handling varies from the very subtle to the very direct, depending on his ideas. He makes full use of an overall dark colored underpainting, either blue or red, and by overpainting in the lighter tones an undercurrent of movement caused by this dark underpainting gives the top layers an intensity and sparkle not achieved by direct painting. He is well worth looking at carefully.

Edward Burra: Of all the most infuriating painters in watercolor Edward Burra, another modern British painter, takes the biscuit. He disproves most of the taught principles of water-color . He works on a gigantic scale. He uses cartridge paper. He sometimes lets his washes get muddy and he overworks his paint, blotting and scrubbing it about. Nevertheless his paintings are incredibly fine; particularly when you think that, though they glow and can easily be seen across the widest room, they are only painted in pure watercolor. Some of these compositions are over five feet high. He does them in sections, pasting them all together afterwards to make the finished design.

It is interesting to note that the drawings by these painters are invariably without tone. Perhaps, because they favour watercolor they make more use of line.

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Modern Watercolor Artists and their Methods

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