A couple decades ago, I was known regionally as a watercolor painter. Today, folks think I'm an oil painter. And most recently in a local show I was deemed a landscape painter. What's this all about? The esteemed John Singer Sargent is often called a portrait painter, and when artists refer to his palette of colors, more often than not they are referring to his oil palette. Take a look at these two paintings by Sargent. If you go to the Athenium website
and scroll through their archive of Sargent's paintings, you will find that many of them are done with watercolor and that he painted subjects other than portraits. So what is this tendency of ours that wants to label painters? It is true that many painters prefer a single
medium just as Yo Yo Ma prefers the cello, and a lot of painters feel more at home with a single kind of content, but neither the medium nor the subject is the goal. The point is how artists express themselves in whatever medium and with whatever subject. Back in 2012, I took a canoe trip down the Tugalo river. While one potential painting after another swept through my vision, I kept thinking watercolor, but when I settled down to do this new series, I found it was asking to be interpreted with pastels. This is not so different from the reason Beethovan composed some of his works for piano and others for
violin.
Whether one uses acrylics, oils, watercolor, pastels, colored pencil, earth pigment, gouache, color inks, encaustic, markers, dyes or whatever-- the material is just the vehicle of expression. It is not the main subject. You can access the archive of all my newsletters at anytime by going HERE. |
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