Blog

In the Artist’s Dictionary that I may one day write, the term wet on wet will mean “go nuts,” and rule will mean “something that should be broken at least once in every painting.”

Wet on wet actually means the painting process by which layers of wet paint are applied onto previously administered layers of wet paint. When painting with oils this means that you will get an interesting “hmmm” from each brushstroke which you can take all the time in the world to ponder. With watercolor it means either “Wow, that's interesting” or “Holy Crap! No No No No No NO NO NO NO FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING HOLY NO NO NOOOOOOO!” There is no in-between.

Understatement will be defined as “painting with watercolor requires patience.” Technically, it requires the patience of Job times that of Sisyphus times that of a whaler's wife times 4000, but I will want to keep the dictionary simple so that part will remain implied.   

Armed with these definitions, let's take a look-see at this painting. The scene is the parking lot outside the Crossroads Art Center, where I and my Wednesday Night Paint Group peeps create masterpieces and the occasional felted moose on a weekly basis. As parking lots go, blah, but for some reason it is a fantastic location to view sunsets. I can't tell you how many times we’ve packed up to head home, walked out the door and said “Look at that sky, we should've been out here painting!” Then we all whip out our phones to take photographs. This happened recently, but the sunset was so magnificent that no cellphone camera could even begin to capture the colors. Hence this painting.

What I did was paint the sky colors in one grand wet on wet explosion and then left that part alone (Good Anthony!). But then I continued applying the washes for the rest of it (trees, parking lot, buildings) and did not let those washes dry (Bad Anthony!). You see, in watercolor the second wet in “wet on wet” refers to any previously applied paint that has not had at least 78 days in the Sahara to dry. It might look dry. It might feel dry. It ain't dry. Yes, you can use a hair-dryer to hurry things along a bit, but that kills the complete wet on wet-ness of it all, makes unpleasant noise harshing the mellow of the paint group, and requires a hair dryer, which I don't have. 

These other washes were simple and didn't take particularly long, but even after I toured the group checking out what the other artists were working on the paper still felt like the interior of an oyster. 

I don't have the patience of Job, Sisyphus, or a whaler's wife, but I do try to have more than one painting to work on at a time. The difficulty was that both were in a “need to let things dry a bit” stage and I was chomping at the bit. So I started working on finer details like shadows, building texture, branches and whatnot. This does not work. Ever. In addition to a dictionary, I may need to also draft up the Ten Commandments of watercoloring, starting with Thou shalt not try to put fine detail on any paint that has not achieved the desiccation of a Death Valley drought. If you do, your thinnest lines will blob out to amoeba shapes, your loveliest hues will dry to mud brown, and your prayers that maybe you'll at least salvage a happy accident will be answered with Olympian sighs of spiritual disdain. 

This is why so many people fear watercolor. Seriously, I doubt any other painting media inspires more fear, hatred, anger or despair. It just does not do what you want it to. This holds true even when you try to get it to misbehave. I've painted hundreds of watercolors and not one, even my very favorites, turned out as planned. It is an evil evil evil medium. Oooh! Another definition for my dictionary.

Getting back to this, the painting seemed fun and all, but the fat details and mud irritated me. So before I proclaimed it finished, I let it dry for a few weeks then went back on a whimsy salvation mission. Didn't require much, a few doodle-y lines hither and thither, but it grounded the image. Most importantly, I left most of that wet on wet sky alone to speak for itself. And the result, my friends, really is what the parking lot sky outside the Crossroads Art Center looked like on April 5, 2017.