Word: watercolor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Spanning about 70 years, Farndon's career saw the compilation of a fairly large corpus of work. He won numerous prizes for both oil and watercolor (mostly for his oils) and made the transition between four or five fairly distinct styles with varying degrees of success. Presumably early influences (Farndon eccentrically refused to date a single canvas) can be found in the late Romantics, as evidenced in some uneventful and rather unexciting landscapes which ended up relegated to the basement of Vose galleries...
Cohn chose to limit her study of black to prints because she believes the intensity of "blackness" in a carbon or intaglio print is substantially different from the more fragile writing inks and watercolor pigments. Also because prints are made from a single layer of black and tend to form an opaque, continuous surface, they project a constancy and immutability not found in drawing or painting...
...extended into his dealings with the larger tradition that geography prevented him from joining. He knew the Old Masters only at second hand: reproductions of Bruegel and Bosch, Rembrandt and Tintoretto in the Melbourne Public Library, and in the National Gallery of Victoria some of William Blake's original watercolor illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. All this predisposed him to narrative. Sometimes the stories in his paintings are explicit -- illustrations of the Bible, for instance, into which Boyd (like Blake) injected his own obsessions...
Howe's technique remains fairly constant in all of his works. He paints with acrylics, which he prefers because they respond well to re-working: "Watercolor is like a typewriter; acrylic is like a word-processor." He starts each piece with a gray underpainting on which he builds layers of brighter color--he doesn't use any pigments straight from the tube, preferring instead to mix subtle tones. His darkest shades are made up of reds, blues, and greens; he never uses black in a painting. Howe's brush strokes are, for the most part, controlled, although in some...
Where Are You Going, Manyoni?, by Catherine Stock (Morrow; $15). The pick of a good year: the author, a fine watercolor artist, follows a little Zimbabwean girl as she wakes up at dawn and walks miles through forests and grasslands to her school. Small children can have fun finding Manyoni's tiny figure in a grove of fig trees or waist-deep in riverside grass; older kids can learn to spot the civet cat, the yellow hornbill and the impalas, kudus and wildebeests she passes. The exceptional illustrations treat the vast African landscape with awe and love. Beautifully redrawn cave...