Plein Air Class for Watercolors
By Zan Barrage
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Plein Air Class for Watercolors - Zan Barrage
Plein Air Class for Watercolors
Zan Barrage
Introduction
Watercolor is a natural medium for painting outdoors. Compact and requiring little gear, it is ideal for artists who want to capture nature’s essence. It is the oldest art medium with a history that goes back all the way to the cave paintings at Altamira 15,000-30,000 years ago. It was used extensively in Asia for painting miniatures and eliminating manuscripts and for painting landscapes as well. From there, it was introduced to Europe and used regularly since the 14th century.
In the 18th Century, the British were the first to popularize the medium. Watercolors were an essential part of the tradition of the Grand Tour. Akin to last century’s instamatic camera or your smart phone today. A tour of Europe was never complete without a series of watercolors to show for it. At the same time, watercolors were being used to document topography, archeology and wildlife. Watercolor illustrators were on board most expeditions to map, catalogue or explore the world on British exploration ships. For the less adventurous, tours of Britain were promoted by such artists as William Gilpin and his account of the Wye Valley.
The medium remained one of sketching and illustrating until the turn of the century when artists such as Turner, Sandby and Gritin elevated it to a fine arts medium. Other artists followed and across the ocean, the Hudson River School painters used watercolors to depict the great wilderness of the new continent. It was the Americans that made the major dent in using watercolors outdoors. John Singer Sargent and to a great extent Winslow Homer moved the medium farther than anyone had done before.
Bold bright colors, expressive brush marks and a painterly approach marks the work of both of these artists.
Sargent chose the European scene to depict in watercolors outdoors. His works in Venice and the Swiss Alps are landmarks in the history of watercolors. Homer, an outdoorsman and hunter, used the medium while fishing and hunting in New England and forever changed the way we see the North American landscape in paintings. Others including Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast followed, and their works marked a departure from the sedentary traditional works before them. They invigorated the medium and placed it squarely on a footing to catch up with oil paints. Today, there is no clear daylight between oils, acrylics and watercolors as art mediums. Advances in color chemistry have rapidly given us a seemingly unending palette of bright, beautiful colors. We are in the enviable position of having the best tools to work with and a plein air movement that has attracted commercial innovation in our