Word: watercolor
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...Homer sesquicentennial (he was born in 1836 and died in 1910) is being celebrated with "Winslow Homer Watercolors," organized by Art Historian Helen Cooper at the National Gallery in Washington. (It runs there through May 11, and will then travel to the Amon Carter Museum in Forth Worth and the Yale University Art Gallery, where Dr. Cooper is curator of American paintings and sculpture.) Her catalog is a landmark in Homer studies. It puts Homer in his true relationship to illustration, to other American art and to the European and English examples he followed, from Ruskin to Millet; its vivacity...
Though Homer exhibitions up to now have tended to treat his watercolors as ancillary to his oils, mere preparations, it is clear from this one that Homer did not think that way himself and that he did more than any other 19th century American artist to establish watercolor as an important medium in the U.S. In structure and intensity, his best watercolors yield nothing to his larger paintings. Homer had great powers of visual analysis; he could hardly look at a scene without breaking it down and resolving it as structure, and some of his paintings of the Adirondack woods...
...Watercolor is tricky stuff, an amateur's but really a virtuoso's medium. It is the most light-filled of all ways of painting, but its luminosity depends on the white of the paper shining through thin washes of pigment. One has to work from light to dark, not (as with oils) from dark to light. It is hospitable to accident (Homer's seas, skies and Adirondack hills are full of chance blots and free mergings of color) but disaster-prone as well. One slip, and the veil of atmosphere turns into a mud puddle, a garish swamp. The stuff...
...what remains of the many-trunked Elephant 6 scene. But the market for trippy harmonics that the Georgian collective once served has been cornered for the moment by even weirder psychedelic varietals, and the mantle that rests on Barnes’ shoulders comes now with slightly dimmed rainbow-watercolor sheen and a koan-like paradox. With the collective’s founders dispersed to side projects and Powerpuff soundtracks—or, in Jeff Mangum’s case, last sighted piloting a transatlantic aeroplane somewhere near Amelia Earhart’s—does Elephant 6 still matter...
Egon Schiele’s “Sleeping Figure with a Blanket,” with its watercolor browns and dreamsicle oranges, employs less inviting colors than the Kokoschka lithographs but is no less visually-stimulating. As is the case with several of the Klimt sketches, Schiele intentionally waffles on the orientation of the work, in part by signing the piece twice, once to indicate that the piece is meant to be viewed as a portrait and again, indicating a landscape...