Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2025 i Watercolor Artist

I love painting with watercolor, but I also love drawing. While many watercolorists draw just a few lines and let the paint tell their story, I seek to find a happy balance between watercolor and pencil—a “marriage” in which each medium can successfully stand on its own yet be enhanced by its pairing with the other. Like most successful marriages, achieving this balance requires a gentle approach and a bit of work. When I was an architecture student years ago, I not only loved drawing buildings and spaces, but I grew to love the qualities of pencil drawings—the soft edges, the line variations expressing the energy of the human hand, even the feel of friction as the pencil moves across the paper. Later, when working as an architectural illustrator, I…

When artist Lisa Tennant was starting graduate school at Eastern Michigan University, the art building—which was originally a science building built in the early 1900s—had just burned down due to faulty wiring. At the time, Tennant had been struggling to find a meaningful direction for her paintings, so she grabbed a sketchbook and walked the campus, searching for inspiration. When she came upon the art building, she was struck by the state of it: One corner was badly damaged, and it looked like a bomb had hit it. “I sketched the building and the broken windows,” she says. “Then I started experimenting with different combinations of styles using the burnt-out architecture as my subject.” This exploration launched the artist's fascination with both urban landscapes and abandoned places, and—eventually—led her to…

Mixed-media artist Stan Kurth hasn't always worked abstractly—“at least not intentionally,” he says. “Like every other child growing up, I wanted to represent things as close to reality as possible in my drawings and paintings.” His pursuit of realism didn't diminish until well after college, a time when he had been focusing on painting representationally in oil. The artist's shift in aesthetic coincided with exploration of new media, too. “I painted my last oil painting in 1976,” he says. “I started painting with acrylic and watercolor because my family couldn't tolerate the oil mediums.” Around that same time, Kurth was becoming more interested in the process of painting. “Brushstrokes and gestures were becoming more profound in my mind,” he says. He found himself attracted to works in which the artists…

When Pat Moseuk was very young, she painted and drew realistically, often copying favorites of the Old Masters. Later, after studying illustration and design in college, and then working as a graphic designer and freelance illustrator, she felt her painting efforts gravitating toward abstraction. The change in direction offered a “sense of relaxation and freedom from the perfect world of painting realistically,” Moseuk says. “Working abstractly provided this incredible freedom to create something without constraints.” Moseuk works intuitively and is constantly experimenting with new materials. She uses acrylics mainly, plus a mix of watermedia. For a substrate, she generally prefers to work on cotton rag board prepped with gesso. “While the gesso is wet, I write into it and make multiple markings,” she says. “I then apply multiple, thin layers…

Nestled along the Yellow Sea, in the Shandong province on China's eastern coast, the city of Qingdao blends modern urban living with a rich cultural history. Known as “Green Island,” the vibrant metropolis has managed to preserve much of its past while keeping its gaze set firmly on the future. Qingdao's unique mix of colonial-era German architecture and sleek skyscrapers stands in stark contrast to the more uniform towerblocks typically found in other fast-growing cities. From the red-tiled roofs of hillside villas to winding cobblestone streets; from amber-colored mountains to golden sand beaches, the place radiates a timeless elegance, offering visitors an experience that feels at once both nostalgic and forward-looking. The city serves as the setting for the annual Qingdao International Watercolor Grand Prix Exposition. Now in its 11th…

After painting in a traditional fashion for about a decade, Karen Knutson began searching for a new challenge. “I wanted to make my paintings appear ghostlike—where the viewer can see through some elements,” she says. Her first successful painting in this new style featured grapes with vertical lines going through them. “I was so excited to have created something new and different,” she says. “I had always wanted my work to stand apart—to be unmistakably from my heart and my own ideas.” Knutson embraced the open-ended nature of painting with this new approach. “There's a mystery in not knowing exactly what the end product will be,” she says. “Although I do almost always start with a design study, I let the painting talk to me. I'm willing to take the…

When we first begin painting, we're obsessed with what materials to use and how and what to paint. We look up to established painters; we have our favorites and often want to learn to paint just like them. Life at this stage is all about the technical aspects of painting, such as mixing color and learning how to see and paint values. Workshops, art academies or private tutors, combined with lots of effort, will help us achieve these goals. Ideally, we also learn about the history of art—and the artists who came before us and how we're standing on their shoulders. But let's say we've done all that. We've put in the time and effort to refine our skills and have become a technically skilled painter. Eventually we'd come to…

Vermont-based artist Todd Anderson paints urban scenes with disarming directness, launching straight into his watercolors without a pencil drawing beneath. He embraces the anomalies and idiosyncrasies that arise from this approach, allowing verticals and horizontals to lean and slant so that the space feels flexible, relaxed and playful. This spatial fluidity is supported by Anderson's delight in creating light, often managing long passages of subtle tone and color changes as shadows envelop his subjects. “What's wonderful about light is that it can't exist without darkness,” says the artist. “I'm not talking about complete darkness, but shadows. It's the shadows that inform you as to the source and direction of light. These two things have to coexist, or you can't enjoy either of them. I love getting lost in the light…

Abstract art, according to the Tate Museums' website, is any art “that doesn't attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality, but instead uses shapes, colors, forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect.” The non-objective nature of the approach leads to a lot of misconceptions, but there's a rich history in abstract painting and plenty of creative reward for artists who are drawn to exploration, experimentation and a spirit of play. The artists featured here embrace an abstract approach to painting and use a mix of watermedia—as well as all the key elements of art—to put down a creative statement. Read on to discover the inspirations and influences, and the guiding principles and processes, that have shaped and steered their adventures in abstraction.…

When a young Kathleen Mooney encountered Richard Diebenkorn's oil painting, Ingleside, on a school trip to the Grand Rapids Art Museum, she fell “head over heels” for abstraction, and has been enthralled ever since. “It was the color and the light, of course, but something about the shapes turned the flat, monumental canvas into a place that you could step into and experience a timeless yet specific moment in time,” she says. “It was complex and simple at the same time. I could tell it was important for me. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before.” Mooney's artwork is the creative outcome of a selfprofessed “obsession” with archeology and abstraction, art and memory—investigations that are all “deeply intertwined,” she says. “My paintings rely on shapes, relationships—and time. My…

When it comes to painting inspiration, living in Colorado provides an embarrassment of riches. In addition to the majestic peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the rivers and aspen trees, there's also the urban excitement of downtown Denver, the architecture of the Victorian West—even historic mining towns. Colorado really has it all. Among the amazing options is a location just southeast of Boulder, about a 45-minute drive from Denver. Here, the Great Plains come to an abrupt stop and the Rockies begin. Driving down a stretch of Cherryvale Road, I can always find my muse amid the beauty of the Front Range. The landscape unveils in a breathtaking panorama of rolling foothills, distant peaks, grazing cattle and old barns. In addition to the inspiring sights, there's also the quiet melody of…