THE ARTISTS SELECTED for the Water Paper Paint Gallery collectively capture the inimitable nature of watercolor. Each, through insight and talent, conveys his or her ideas with beauty, tenacity, mystery, and ingenuity. Some of the artists I knew prior to writing this book and others were discovered in the process. Each was chosen because I respect and admire his or her concept and aesthetic. These artists incorporate new media, collaborate with other artists, consider their paintings on a grand scale, and even develop new printmaking techniques to use with watercolor. The imagery, whether figurative or nonobjective, is sometimes familiar and yet unexpected. Watercolor itself is literally and metaphorically a transparent medium. As the viewer, we are at once aware of the paint’s beauty but also transported by the artists’ handling and overall arrangement. When you notice the tactility of the materials and then find yourself in the mind of the artist, beyond the tools themselves, these, to me, are signs that you are in presence of the finest kinds of paintings.
David Wilson, in his gestural, free-form representations of nature, is concerned with the notion of capturing and preserving fleeting moments. Floating small elements within a page, such as butterflies or a diminutive landscape, seem to be an act of preserving the passing of things. Where Wilson’s work is about capturing the essence of something, Andy Farkas seems intent on discovery. Farkas considers himself to be a storyteller and his work to be about the process of finding and telling life’s stories. He uses watery sweeps of color, written notations, and wood-block printing processes to weave together his ideas.
Many of Geninne Zlatkis’s well-known pieces include bird imagery, painted in profile, with delineated wings and feathers, and mingled with flora all about. Yet to me, it’s her journals that bear witness to her artistry. The richly layered pages embed life experience in every mark and word with depictions of the natural world at the heart. While Zlatkis’s work is illustrative and full of pattern, Margie Kuhn paints objects, manmade and from nature, in detailed likeness, in a way that fools the eye. In her paintings, she removes items from context to examine the objects on their own and in relation to other elements and environments. Leaves, postage stamps, postcards, old photographs, clippings, and even bits of tape become transformed through her brush and are glimpses into a world which seems much more vast.
Anna Hepler and Christine Kesler pursue art making in different media, including three-dimensions and on a broad scale. Hepler builds sculptural forms from wire and from pieces of sheet plastic. She inflates the plastic forms and then watches them slowly deflate over time. She draws from those forms, whether wire or plastic, in their various states of transformation. Her drawn work shows an understanding of light, shadow, and perceived space, as informed by her sculptures. Christine Kesler takes her paintings and considers them within a larger scale. She uses a regenerative process of working into her previous paintings and drawings in order to destroy and rebuild them into something new. She arranges and installs the pieces all over the walls, allows them to unfold in a corner, or touch the floor. These installations form associations and ultimately blur boundaries of a once chronological process.
A few of the chosen artists collaborate with other artists. Carrie Walker gathers the discarded drawings of unspecified artists; some from the nineteenth century. She paints creatures into the found and desolate scenes, bringing life to pieces of art that were otherwise overlooked. The collaborative duo of Gracia Haby, (a collage artist) and Louise Jennison, (a watercolorist), known as Gracia & Louise, create works of art, artists’ books, and zines. Lightly painted watercolors of jewels surround depicted images saturated with color, as if unearthed from history. Together they relay narratives of new and invented worlds. All of the artists delve into their imagination in one way or another, including Kyle Field, who through his imagery and color, reveals the inner workings of his mind. It is here, through his explorations, where we meet the unexpected and perhaps the unknown. His meandering lines feel at once automatic and lyrical and seem to marry the act of drawing with painting into one symbiotic process.