Light!

The Hangar Aquarellista's have been playing with light this week. In a couple of different forms, "classic", "realistic" and abstract. This is a brilliant landscape of Ann Edwards, inspired on the dead sea. She has not used white, the bright orange works very well to suggest a source of light, because of the strong contrast with the cool blues and greys!In this classic monochrome nude (by Renée Richters) the parts that are not painted are the lightest and suggest a very bright light. More light of Renée Richters. We do use the transparancy of the aquarelle paint, but our style is not so soft in colour! - for us it is more the contrast that suggests light and makes the picture interesting. Both abstracts full of light, by Marina Teding van Berkhout

Estranging again - Cut it up!

The Hangar Aquarellista's were going realistic last week!

Three stages of an aquarelle by Bibbi Isaksson:

And the first stage of Cathie van der Stel's new still life (so sorry for the poor picture quality guys, next week real camera instead of phone...)

Composition by Anna Karin Fast

Anyway - one way or another most of us ended up being smart & creative: with work that didn't quite work out. As all aquarellists know it is very hard to "repair" an aquarelle without it going dull and un-spontaneous. But look what happens when you cut it up, and then not throw it in the bin - but start a whole new composition....

Landscape by Ann Edwards

Portrait by Birgitta EngvallEstranged Nebula painting by Brigitte Hole

An idea? I have always torn up a lot of my work - and use good parts again - to form a completely different picture... And also worked on smaller size papers to combine those into large sizes, which makes me think & act in a different way than I would have on one large piece of paper... See my website for examples!

Nebula's

Aquarelle by Marina Teding van Berkhout

The aquarellista member logo is now available. Let us know if you are interested to have one to place on your website - and - if you are an aquarellista that is - we'll be happy to link back to you!

Aquarelle by Anna Karin Fast

We (the Aquarellista's group that works in Atelier Le Hangar in Chateauneuf de Grasse) explored the concept of "Nebula's" this week... and the results were very very worthwhile!

aquarelle by Ann Edwards

Nebula's are colorful gases that are expelled where the stars are exploding.

Or, in official terms:

A diffuse mass of interstellar dust or gas or both, visible as luminous patches or areas of darkness depending on the way the mass absorbs or reflects incident radiation.

Aquarelle by Cathie van der Stel

Well, for us they were an unending source of inspiration - look at the power, the force, the colourfulness of this work! And it kept us thinking about the Galaxy, planets, lightyears, and how small we actually are... Luckily we have our aquarelle to express ourselves...

Aquarelle by Sandra Seymour-Dale

Aquarelle by Bibbi Isaksson

Drawbacks of Aquarelle

Everytime I meet artists who use aquarelle as their main technique, I notice that we share that enthousiasm and motivation for the medium.

We all try out other types of paint, and other media, but most of us come back to using aquarelle. I have already written a couple of posts about "why that is the case" and I am pretty sure more will follow, but to avoid the impression that this is a new religion - I'd like to point out a couple of drawbacks!

Aquarelle by Sandra Seymour-Dale

The first is one that I have encountered -many times: Aquarelle is transparent and therefore "light" and subtle. This is a BIG disadvantage if you show your work together with oil, acrylic and other paintings with opaque media. Nobody will notice your work when it is hanging between an oil and an acrylic... (Solution: have your expo's together with sculptors...)

Aquarelle is painted on paper and has at best the "grain" of the paper, but the big fat relief that you can have with other media is not possible. All the 3D will have to come from suggestion, shadows, shading etc. The painting itself is very 2D...

Aquarelle is not water resistant - it needs to have glass in front of it for protection. No big deal, but, when you do exhibitions, it is fragile. It reflects, lighting is important and the alternatives, matted glass or plexiglass are less beautiful.

Aquarelle by Bibbi Isaksson

And did I mention "heavy"? My paintings are rather big, I use simple aluminium frames, but a 70 X 100 cm frame weighs 7 kilo!! If I have an exhibition of 20 paintings I have to drag around 140 kilo's from my atelier to my car and from the car to the gallery... My next expo will be 30 paintings!! But I'll just walk up and down 30 times - aquarellista's fitness!!

Uhmmm. Yes, of course - last but not least: it is a difficult technique. You have to plan for the white, as the "white" (or the light) in an aquarelle is the colour of the paper - you can only go darker... It drips and bleeds. (these are also the good points by the way) And you cannot really repair mistakes - I'm doing several versions of one painting - and must admit I throw away the ones that I don't like. The more experience you get, the less that happens by the way...!

Did I leave out important disadvantages?? Please don't hesitate to give them!! It proves where the character is :)

Long live the aquarellista's!

Aquarelle by Cathie van der Stel

Needed: good websites of other Aquarellista's (member or not) We have Catherine Earl's and mine... There must be many more...