1 - MARCH - 2003

When writing about watercolour, the battle is lost in advance because of this technique has one outstanding characteristic, it is its elusive nature, whether approached from a literary or a practical angle. Watercolour is wrapped up in the mystery of extraordinarily simple things which can reach the highest levels of beauty, accomplishment, entertainment and joy because even those who come to it without being experts feel the thrill of creation, the pleasure of colours, the sensitivity of the materials. Its simplicity is linked to the ordinary nature of the matter because essentially it has the wealth of earth and nature, not the wealth of a precious stone. This is the most democratic technique since its low cost makes it accessible to people, children and everybody who one day discovers that there is an exquisite part of their soul and pours it out on paper with colours, But there is still more.

    If we had to relate it with human history, we would find that already in Egypt there were watercolour painters or artists who used it, this technique travels with us as we evolve as creative human brings, it acts as an instrument of expression and liberation and its ordinariness moves us since at moments when it is practically banished it remains dormant, never dead, waiting for some prince to wake it up. It is in England that the great Kings of Watercolour arise and their realm goes beyond the physical frontiers of the kingdom touches the sensitivities of all Europe.

    Watercolour awoke from its slumber in the 15th and 16th centuries when great artists such as Durer use this technique for their studies of landscapes on their journeys in the Alps and in Italy and also to represent plants, birds, etc.. In the 16th century it was used by Holbein too for miniature portraits. In the 17th century it was used by some Flemish artists such as Van Ostade, Cuyp, etc. who painted in particular flowers and landscapes. Unquestioned icons of Western painting such as Rubens and Jordaens used it to highlight their drawings.

    But watercolour still was not completely awake.. we must wait until the 18th century for it to begin to be appreciated as an independent technique with its own purpose, not an auxiliary or complement but a separate aesthetic category with its own momentum and its own themes since at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th a special concept of the creative act is promoted and this led to a new treatment of genres; oil painting ended up giving way and sharing its unquestioned crown with watercolour, making a ‘marriage with separate bank accounts’ yet to be bettered, in which oil painting is the king and watercolour the queen.

    From the 18th Century the history of watercolour is inevitably linked to landscape painting since in this century the multiplication of minor landscapers in Venice meant that watercolour became gradually more important. All this is connected to the dominating fashion in Europe for ‘cultural journeys’ in which artists and art lovers found watercolour to be the ideal vehicle to take notes of the places they visited or make sketches ‘in situ’ which they later completed in their studios. At the time these works were nothing more than the preparation for other, more important works but nowadays these watercolours are appreciated in their own right.

    During the reign of Louis xvi in France, watercolour artists such as Watteau, Lille and Jean Gabriel Moreau were accepted in the French Academy; this country was where it was most widely accompanied by the technique of the nib.

    In the 19th Century we could say that watercolour became a ‘British affair’, in 1804 the Royal Watercolour Society was founded. The painters who became the leaders of this technique are Turner, Sandby, Bonington and the American Whistler; they introduced new elements and techniques and had a decisive influence on the French Romantics since the freedom and speed offered by watercolour adapted itself well to the pictorial judgement of painters such as Gericault and Delacroix.

    In this way from the middle of the 18th century watercolour painting on a very important space for itself, we should remember that at first watercolour paintings were given the same value we give to postcards, souvenirs and photos etc. today and were collected and kept in albums but we need to wait longer for them to be considered works of art in their own right.

    Nowhere was watercolour practiced with more enthusiasm than in England, the demand for private classes in this technique spread to make up for the lack of teaching in the Royal Academy. Exhibitions were held in less prestigious rooms than exhibitions of oil paintings. Watercolour artists attached their theoretical and stylistic bases to the English picturesque, romanticism, and in this context the great Turner made an important opening in his search for the ‘sublime’ :It was gradually adopted by many painters associated with oil painting such as Cézanne, Van Gogh etc..

On technique

        The material for watercolour painting is pigments prepared with gum dissolved in water. When moistened, a transparent solution is obtained; this is normally applied on paper (in the past there was a wider variety of media, even marble was used). The classical English method is to use the white colour of the paper as the point of maximum light applying transparent ashes one on top of the other to obtain degrees of tone and colour: For the purists of this English school, the use of any form of opaque watercolour is Frenchified and heretical. However, the greatest experts in watercolour including Turner, Girtin, Cozens and Cotman used variations of the above norm. Turner made free use of opaque colour and also used dry colour, scraped the paper, etc..

    These techniques are regarded with horror by some sectors yet as I see it they are correct since the technique must be submitted to the idea which is to be represented and should not dominate the artist; rather, the artist should use the technique since an excessive reverence for technical orthodoxy degenerates into making the paint (as a material) more important than what is painted and this would degenerate into making the actual artist redundant, the materials themselves would be admired without even being handled (which with apologies to ‘modernists’ really is an artistic heresy). These modern purists or puritans of the technique would be capable of rejecting a magnificently expressive picture simply because the colour is too opaque or the paper is not correct. Paradoxically, the greatness of the great watercolour artists lies not in their great technical skill but in their creative talent and their ideas and plans; they were able to get the most out of the materials to accomplish these projects, if their objectives had been different they would probably have used the materials in a different way.