With Lines, Without Lines

If you have been following this blog of late, you will know that I have been putzing around with watercolor on a more serious level than in a long time. (Really, more serious than ever before.) In the process, I have struggled with control of the medium, like all who begin with watercolors. Lines help when a painting fails, and sometimes lines add to a painting if that is part of its intended style.

Having done sumi-e for many years, I love lines and their expressiveness. I also like colors, and that is where self-control needs to show up the most. Think of Hawaiian shirts or 40s palm frond prints and you get the idea about my ideas of color – louder and more is the best!

This painting of Mirror Lake was very satisfying as I felt the use of sumi ink and colors worked well.

The painting is inspired by a number of paintings I found when I googled “pears grapes watercolor” and chose images. There were a lot out there, and so I painted a number of grapes-and-pear paintings yesterday.

This is the one that pleases me the most. I like its painterly elements and the colors of both the grapes and the pears. It is the most controlled and thought-through of the series. I did not draw any pencil lines prior to painting it, but painted it freehand, recalling brushwork in sumi-e.   It’s easy to fall prey to haste in watercolor, to achieve a “painterly” look, but it really requires forethought, just as sumi-e does.

I did four paintings altogether in this series, which you can find under “My Other Lives” above.