Waterlilies in Chateauneuf

Anna Karin Fast worked for a long time on these "pebbles"... It is an interesting development to follow, with the pebbles attracting more attention because the background is contrasting more... 

Again we were a small group of die-hards last time. Same reason as last week for most - flu, nasty colds and other winter-illnesses hit hard at the moment! But the aquarellista's-present, did a great job on yet more impressions of Chateauneuf!

Sandra Seymour-Dale started on a very interesting watercolour - can't wait to see the finished product!!

Cathie van der Stel finished this fabulous and romantic door in the village...

And Birgitta Engvall did it again - what a mysterious, quiet atmosphere!

We also worked on another subject, "water lilies". Not all of those are finished, you'll see them in next post, but two are definitely worth showing now!

First of all Denise Holt visited. Originally French, she lives and works in the US. She is an aquarellista too and as long as she is visiting France, she'll work with us! Here are her water lilies:

And Anna Karin Fast did a version - in her typical, spontaneous and "fast" style

More later - I will participate in "les petitis formats", an exhibition organised by the artothèque of neighbouring village Valbonne - and I will be posting about that for sure...

Deep Sea II

There were still two loose ends in the Deep Sea project... Anna Karin Fast added a bit more accent to the "hinted" eyes of her clown fish...

It worked!

And I didn't show you the "unfinished project" of Cathie van der Stel in the last post, but right now I will!!! She worked hard on it this week and the result is positively stunning...

You can rest assured that this will be shown in the next exhibition. I love this picture of a figure seen from under water!! Well done Cathie...

Some thoughts on aquarelle

I have accidentally written my regular post on another blog - and I cannot easily put it in here - I'll have to re-do it (grrr) but luckily there was more last Tuesday:

Sandra's experiment...

And it actually looks great!!

The different approach of aquarellista's is of course that if you don't like your painting, you tear it up and throw it out. When in doubt, you can keep it - a painting on paper doesn't take much space- and work it out later (that's why we hardly ever varnish). And when you are sure that the painting is crap - apart from one part - you get rid of it - apart from that part! Hard to do when you create oil paintings on canvas nailed on wood!! (hehehe)

The Chateauneuf Expo

As promised, I'd post any article that would appear about our Hangar Exhibition. And there actually was one, in last week's Letter of the Mayor, the bimonthly magazine of the "Commune de Chateauneuf". Typically, there are no pictures of our aquarelles in it. This proves again that Aquarelles need a lot of publicity, so spread the word! Right now it is an acquired taste - not everybody likes it, mostly because it is not understood (and maybe people aren't interested in art with poetic beauty, subtlety and transparence??!!) And then of course there's the challenge that I mentioned before, that if you combine oil (or acrylic) paintings with aquarelles, you won't see the latter! That's why I always try to have exhibitions with sculptors. I can recommend that... Anyway, here's the article:

Not bad at all and at least it mentions us! And the very good news is that we will be there AGAIN from 10 - 20 December!

Wet skies

Last week the Tuesday Aquarellista's painted skies, in wet-in-wet technique. And I took some really crappy pictures - with my phone... Which is a shame because the results were truly worthwhile and the pics don't do them justice. But I'll show them anyway - they give an impression of what you can achieve in terms of mystery when you drip bits of pigment or aquarelle paint on a very wet surface. It's been a worthwhile experiment for us, definitely worth repeating.

Below a very dutch landscape with a very dutch sky in a combination of wet and dry:

Marianne van Wijngaarden

We had an aquarellista from Devon visiting, Carol. She made several smaller aquarelles, we liked this seaview a lot!

A very nice cloud by Lies Timmermans- inspired by Adrie Hello
Two nebula-like skies by Cathie van der Stel


A heavy wet in wet storm! - by Brigitte Hole

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!