It’s a race against the clock.
The paper must be wet as the artist quickly mixes his paints. It’s matter of working with the medium instead of against it. Lines can bleed. Colors can stray.
For many students in Professor of Art Samuel Knecht’s Advanced Watercolor class, taught every other spring, this is both the joy and challenge of working with watercolors.
“She wet the whole paper, painted all these layers while it was still wet,” Knecht said. “The moisture of the paper causes the colors to bleed around and create some interesting effects, but then she’ll work over this with additional strokes and color to develop the painting more. We’ll work with shadows, with various patterns and so on.”
Knecht said he takes both beginners and and more advanced students in the class.
“The prerequisites for the course are either Drawing I or Design I or permission of the instructor, so we want to make sure that someone taking the class starts out with some somewhat decent drawing quality and maybe some compositional sense gained from taking design,” he said. “Watercolor is a kind of performance art. It is not forgiving. When you put the color on the paper, it soaks in and you’re stuck. People working in watercolor learn how to build a picture layer by layer, starting out light, and gradually deepening the colors.”
Senior Tyler Rose Counts, an English major minoring in graphic design, is taking watercolor this semester for the first time since second grade.
“I really enjoy the colors and the layering. It’s really beautiful to look at,” she said. “The most challenging part has been that you have to do it really fast before the paper dries, so if you’re doing the sky project where it’s this huge wash, it’s kind of stressful if there’s that much space that you have to cover before it dries. So you’ll kind of paint and hyperventilate.”
Knecht said he doesn’t throw the students into this regimen of washing and layering without some preparation work.
“I have a program of beginning exercises where they’re not really under the pressure of building a picture,” he said. “They just do some exercises and abstract design kind of problems, where they gradually get used to how the medium behaves: how much water to use, how much color to load into the mix to get the desired color.”
One of the class’s advanced students, junior Forester McClatchey, said one of the greatest challenges of watercolor painting is the clichés that surround it.
“There are so many clichés about watercolor,” McClatchey said. “The most true are that it’s difficult letting the medium work for you instead of trying to control it. It’s a very unforgiving service. With sculpture or oil painting you can remove a mistake by scraping it away. But with watercolor, once you put the pigment down and it dries, you’re done.”
The production of these pieces are unique to each artist. Each student mixes colors in different ways and layers them differently, Knecht said.
“It’s been fun to see the versatility of watercolor and how different people emphasize different aspects of the medium,” McClatchley said. “Some people paint in a way that’s more aqueous and translucent. Others use a lot of paint and make it more colorful and intense.”
Junior art major Phoebe Kalthoff is even entering some of her watercolor in the student division of the Michigan National Watercolor Society Competition. This is the first year the competition is allowing student entries.
“It’s a painting of a little fish shop in Southern California where my grandparents live,” Kalthoff said. “Watercolor was the first medium I ever worked with. My dad will tell you, the little sunsets I used to paint for him were all identical.”
Since her first paintings, however, Kalthoff has grown in her watercolor abilities.
“I took Watercolor I when I was a senior in high school, but I took it for credit here,” she said. “Knecht only offers it every two years, and I couldn’t take it last time because I had a full schedule; but I love it. The projects in Watercolor II continue to form the skills we learned in Watercolor I. He just kind of gives us our projects, and we work on them by ourselves. It’s basically just painting, which I love.”
For other students, getting used to watercoloring was a little rockier.
“This is my second watercolor class with Professor Knecht,” senior art major Hannah Ahern said. “Previously to that the only watercolor was the little Crayola pack when I was little. Watercolor class will expose you as far as who you are as an artist. The first four months I took watercolor, my heart kind of sunk a little bit and I thought, ‘Why am I an art major? I thought this was what I was good at. Why am I doing this?”
After those four months, Ahern said, she grew to appreciate the medium, allowing it to just be, instead of trying
to control it.
“The risk it involves, you have to make some bold moves to do something really dazzling,” she said. “You could ruin the picture, you also want to entrance the viewer. The most rewarding part about it is when you take a risk and it works out.”
For many of the students in Knecht’s class, overcoming the challenges of watercolor has become one of the greatest rewards.
“The best summation of how tricky watercolor is was stated by John Singer Sargent,” Knecht said. “He’s quite well remembered for virtuoso portraits of high society folks in the Gilded Age. He was a brilliant watercolorist. He once remarked about water color, ‘It’s like riding a bicycle backwards.’”
