Category: watercolors

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “How They Met Themselves”, 1864, Watercolor and Bodycolor on Paper, 11 x 10 Inches, Leicester Galleries

There are three versions of this watercolor “How They Met Themselves”. One exists  in a private collection and the other two at the Fitzwilliam Museum. The first version of this doppelganger theme was made with pen and ink and brush and is dated 1851 1860. It was painted for George Price Boyce, Rossetti’s friend and fellow Pre-Raphaelite artist, during Rossetti’s honeymoon in Paris in 1860, to replace the earlier pen and ink drawing of the same subject which was either lost or destroyed.

In a letter to George Price Boyce dated February 4th of 1861, Dante Rossetti expressed, his intentions to undertaking a watercolour version: “I was much wishing to execute the Bogie pen and ink drawing which you have as a watercolour and would be greatly obliged to you for the loan of it…”

Dante Rossetti, by calling it the `Bogie drawing’, expressed his continuing fascination with the legend of the ‘Doppleganger’, the vision of which is a presentiment of death. To illustrate this strange theme, Rossetti chose the subject of two medieval lovers in a wood meeting their doubles who glow supernaturally. Doppelgänger imagery occurs in poems he admired such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “ The Romaunt of Margaret” and Poe’s “Silence” and also frequently in his own more autobiographical poems such as “Sudden Light”, “Even So”, and “Willowwood”.

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh, “The Sower (After Millet)”, 1881, Pencil, Pen and Brush and Ink, Watercolor on Paper, Van Gough Museum, Amsterdam

“The Sower” was a subject that Vincent van Gogh keep coming back many times in his career. Peasant imagery was of great importance to Van Gogh, who began his career by copying prints of Millet, Corot and other members of the Barbizon School. Van Gogh was a particular admirer of French artist Jean-François Millet, recognizing him as a leading artist.

Although Van Gogh was born into a middle-class family, he came from the small town of Nuenen where agriculture and therefore hard labor was a prevalent industry. Van Gogh later worked in other areas of great poverty. He developed a strong sympathy and respect for the peasants that he saw, and was socialist in his opinions and outlook. Van Gogh’s depictions of peasants remained similar in concept to those of Millet, in that he gave his figures an eternalizing spirit that emphasized their long history rather than using his paintings to advocate change.

Danny Quirk

Danny Quirk, Title Unknown, From the “Faces of War” Series, Watercolor

Danny Quirk is an artist and recent graduate from the Pratt Institute. He specializes in photo realistic watercolors and painting what the camera can’t capture.

“My work is perceivably on the darker side, but the actually is, it’s about exploration. My two current bodies of work are of military, and anatomical themes. The military pieces were derived from countless interviews with military personnel deployed overseas, in the attempts to illustrate what they went through, the war in their eyes. My anatomical works combine classic poses, in dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, with a very contemporary twist… illustrating what’s underneath the skin, and the portrayed figure dissects a region of their body to show the structures that lay beneath.” – Danny Quirk

Eric Itschert

Eric Itschert, “Nude Boy Swimming”, 2017, Drawing and Watercolor on Arches Paper

Eric Itschert was born in 1954 in Overijse, Belgium. While still in secondary school, Eric followed oil painting classes with the painter Georges Lambillotte. He studied at St Serge in Paris in the summer of 1973, Itschert obtained his certificate of architecture in 1978 at the Ecole Supérieure d’Architecture Saint-Luc in Brussels.  He continued his painting studies with Bernard Frinking in 1986 and 1987;  and during his time spent on Paros in the Cyclades in 1989, where he developed his technique of tempera painting.

Philip Dunne

Watercolors by Philip Dunne

Phil Dunne is an illustrator from Dublin, Ireland, where he lives and works. He received his degree in Visual Communications in 2003 at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin. After graduating he started to build his portfolio with work on his clients’ projects.

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Svetlin Vassilev

Illustration by Svetlin Vassilev, Unknown Title

Svetlin Vassilev is a painter and book illustrator born in May of 1971 in Rouse, Bulgaria. He studied in the Intermediate Academy of Arts in Plovdiv and then in the National Academy of Arts in Sophia. He has illustrated more than 20 books, using the mediums of watercolor and acrylic paint.

Since 1997 Vassilev has lived in Greece with his wife Ada and their daughters During this time he has illustrated a wide variety of picture books, some of classical stories and some written by modern authors. In 2004, Svetlin Vassilev received the Special National Award for his illustrations of “Don Quizote”.

George Grosz

George Grosz, “Der Vergiftete”, Watercolor

George Grosz was a German artist known for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920′s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar Republic. He emigrrated to the United States in 1933 and became a naturalized citizen in 1938. He exhibited reguarly and taught for many years athe the Art Students League of New York. In 1956 he returned to Berlin where he died.

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Michael Goro

Michael Goro, “Guangzhou”, Watercolor on Paper

An artist primarily in paintings and etchings, Michael “Misha” Goro was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. where he received his BA in architecture. In 1990, he immigrated to Jerusalem, Israel, where he discovered intaglio printmaking and began to use it as his main medium. In 1993, he moved to the United States and completed his education, receiving MFA in printmaking at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In his current capacity as a chairperson of the graphics department at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, Goro has been instrumental in developing the program and teaching in it for the past nine years.

Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins, “John Biglin in a Single Scull”, 1873, Watercolor on Paper, Yale University Art Gallery

Thomas Eakins was in the vanguard of the army of Americans who invaded Paris during the latter part of the nineteenth century to complete their artistic education. After returning to his hometown of Philadelphia in 1870, Eakins never left the United States again. He believed that great artists relied not on their knowledge of other artists’ works but on personal experience.

For the rest of his career, Eakins remained committed to recording realistic scenes from contemporary American life. During the three years Eakins was abroad, competitive rowing on the Schuylkill River, which runs through Philadelphia, had become the city’s leading sport. In England, rowing had long been regarded as the exclusive activity of gentlemen, but in Philadelphia anyone could take part, since rowing clubs made the expensive equipment available to all. Eakins was an enthusiastic rower himself, but after his time in Paris he regarded the activity less as a form of recreation than a fertile source of subject matter that combined his dedication to modern life with his interest in anatomy.

 

John Jude Palencar

“Tree Goblin, John Jude Palencar, Watercolor and Gesso

After receiving a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design, John Jude Palencar received further training at the Illustrators Workshop in Paris before embarking upon a highly successful career of painting book covers. He is noted for an intense, almost photographic realism with bold colours, though his figures are sometimes juxtaposed with more abstract backgrounds.

Primarily working in the fields of Fantasy and Horror, he has painted covers for some high-profile books, like Christopher Paolini’s popular “Eragon” novels and Jacqueline Carey’s “Kushiel” novels, yet he has painted science fiction covers as well; one standout example was his painting showing a tiny figure against pale ruins for a 1986 republication of David Brin’s 1985 “The Postman”, vaguely similar but vastly superior to Tom Hallman’s cover for the hardcover edition. He has also worked outside the genre for magazines like National Geographic, The Smithsonian, and Time magazine.

Paul Klee

Paul Klee, “Dream City”, 1921Watercolor and Oil on Canvas, 48 x 31 cm, Private Collection

Paul Klee was born in a family of musicians in late 19th century. Klee himself was a musician and practiced violin as a warm-up for painting. Also known as a Swiss painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and writer, Paul Klee’s work has contributed much to the history of art in 20th century. He experimented with new artistic techniques and expressive power of colors. Most of his paintings depict his intellectual curiosity and his detailed knowledge of music, philosophy, and nature.

Claude Buck

Claude Buck, “Sunburst”, Gouache, Watercolor, Pencil, Pen and Colored Ink on Paper, 1913, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, Washington DC

Claude Buck was born in New York City on July 3, 1890. His father was a traditionally trained, commercial artist, and introduced Buck to drawing at age 4. The young Buck copied Greek classics at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at age 14 entered the National Academy of Design, taking classes in still life with Emil Carlsen, figure drawing with Francis Jones, and figure painting George DeForest Brush. He studied there until age 22, receiving eight prizes. Buck then studied in Munich and upon his return began a busy schedule of exhibitions.

He moved to Chicago in 1919, teaching painting for some years at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (SAIC), and becoming a leading member of an avant-garde symbolist artists’ group known as the Introspectives. The group, whose members shared an approach to expressing subjective emotion and experience in their work, included, both Rudolph Weisenborn and Emil Armin. Buck, a modernist, was influenced by writers Edgar Allen Poe and William Blake and eccentric visionary painters Ralph Blakelock and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

He often depicted allegories and literary themes drawn from Romantic sources such as Poe’s poetry, operas by Richard Wagner, as well as classical mythology and the New Testament. He made highly finished still lifes and “hyperrealistic” portraits to support himself and his family. Buck spent the last years of his life in Santa Cruz, and is often considered a California artist despite his deep connections to Chicago.