Now that I’ve decided that I want to start painting again, using a few different mediums but starting with watercolour, I have to find something to paint. My goal is to find my own art style as the easiest way to do that, I’ve found, it to explore a bunch of different styles.
Like many other people in the height of quarantine, I spent a lot of time in my head, imagining my ideal life. Although escapism probably (definitely) isn’t the healthiest pastime, it certainly helped me identify the types of environments I enjoy the most. Because I spent an unreasonable amount of time daydreaming about rolling fields and old, ivy-covered castles, I think the best thing for me to paint right now, the first subject of my exploration, should be landscapes.
Some of the most famous landscapes and landscape artists are impressionists, whose bright colours and defined brush strokes produced some of the most recognisable paintings of the 19th century. Artists like Monet and Renoir created lively scenes with delicate natural details. Although I do love the impressionist style, and I appreciate the impact they had on landscape painting, getting their signature “clean from a distance, but messy up close” look is impactful with oil, but not ideal with watercolour (although I might consider this as part of my inspiration later, with gouache).
The next style I stumbled upon, in my impressive google search “watercolour artists,” was cubism and futurism, in the artist John Marin’s work. Now cubism is a movement that I, ever uneducated, solely associate with Picasso. As it turns out, cubism, a style defined by its cube-forming abstraction of a subject, was an inter-discipline movement that was utilised by many artists, from architects to authors.
Now, I can’t say I particularly relate, or even like, cubism, but I am fascinated by some of Marin’s work, mainly “Pertaining to Stonington Harbor, Maine” (for copyright reasons, this painting can’t be downloaded) which has the strong, defined, brushstrokes that I found attractive in the impressionists, combined with a dry colour that forces the eye around the page.
(Also, his linework is just spectacular, like, wow)
But, I think my absolute favourite piece, which honestly looks nothing like any of the rest, is “Village Scene” by Ted Kautzky. It’s exactly what you imagine when you’re talking about watercolour, a nice, fuzzy scene, with a distinct enough image that it’s memorable but ordinary enough that it could be anywhere, and somehow feeling familiar. This is what I want my art to do. Not just capture an image, but a feeling. The colours he uses are muted; they give all of his works a hazy kind of appearance. This might not be my go-to, I am a brash sculpture after all, but it really works for his subjects.
I’m drawing inspiration from all of these pieces, despite their aggressive differences. However, I think, for my first piece at least, you’ll see a lot of Kautzky similarities.
