Word: watercolor
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...grumbles and rising gorges, Edward Lear painted furiously. He rose before dawn, trudged about all day until he found a landscape that pleased him. Then, after myopically surveying the scene over his spectacles, he began his hasty sketches on odd-shaped scraps of paper from his notebook. His watercolor sketches were meant mostly to be notes for his fastidious and stilted oils, over which he labored long and hard ("I hate the act of painting. . . . It is like grinding my nose off!"). A few of the oils rode into the Royal Academy on the coattails of the Pre-Raphaelites...
...straitened confines of Agassiz impose horrible limitations on any production crew. A tiny stage and woefully inadequate lights are bad enough, but unfortunately the Idler staff was further weakened by poor designers. The exterior scene--purporting to be a garden--had all the carmarks of a grammar school watercolor exercise; and the interior seemed overcomplicated for the small stage. Costuming was excellent, but makeup again seemed amateurish to an inexcusable degree, as principals frequently appeared with faces mottled by huge black spots...
...through back-country towns in her black Hupmobile, stopping at every antique shop and every likely-looking old house to ask permission to poke about a spell. She cared not a jot for antique furniture; what she wanted were old portrait paintings, still-lifes on velvet, birth certificates with watercolor designs around the edges, rusty weathervanes and peeling figureheads...
Limning, as the Elizabethans called it, was done with opaque watercolor on vellum using fine brushes called pencils. In his Art of Limning, Hilliard directed: "The first and chiefest precept which I give is cleanliness, and therefore fittest for gentlemen, that the practicer of limning be precisely pure and cleanly in all his doings . . . take heed of the dandruff of the head shedding from the hair, and of speaking over your work for sparkling, for the least sparkling of spittle will never be helped if it light in the face or any part of the naked...
...light. Mrs. Frank Brunner, of Rockaway Beach, N.Y., who "always liked having original paintings and water-colors in our house," made a habit of dropping in at local auctions every now & then, to pick up a fresh one. Six years ago she had spent $6 on a little watercolor of a farmer trailing home with his scythe at dusk, because she "liked the coloring." It looked very nice in the living room, until a friend of the family happened to suggest she look under the edge of the frame to see if the picture had a signature. It had: Winslow...