The Dimming of a New Mexico Day, February 8, 2010

The Dimming of a New Mexico Day

I’m excited to have a few new watercolors in progress–they’re just not far enough along to post for viewers yet.  As a rule in 2010, I have not been posting finished works already on my website.  But I’m making an exception because this evening I entered three watercolors in the Arlington Visual Arts 34th Annual Regional Juried Art Exhibit.  This is one of them.

Two summers ago, I finished a 3,000-mile plus road odyssey beginning in Texas and going through Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado and finally New Mexico where I connected with my wife who had been vacationing with her daughter.  As we drove back toward Texas together, I was mesmerized by the quality of the New Mexico sunlight, especially during a gathering storm late one afternoon.  This abandoned structure was just ablaze with light in the field, and I could not stop staring at it.  We drove up close, and I got up and walked all around it, photographing it from every conceivable angle, all the time intoxicated by that light.

Watercolor has always intrigued me because of the reflective possibilities of light reflecting off the bright paper through transparent layers of wash.   I read in a book long ago (and wish I had documented it!) “the paper is the atmosphere in which the watercolor breathes.”  That thought has been a consuming passion with me as I have experimented with colored washes in the watercolor world.  With this particular painting, I was spending a great deal of time looking at Edward Hopper paintings and noting his extreme contrasts between sunlight and shade.  I kept layering pigments into the shadows, trying to get this painting to “pop” with that same kind of Edward Hopper contrast.

Tags: Americana, Andrew Wyeth, Blues, drybrush, Edward Hopper, field painting, French Impressionism, New Mexico, nostalgia, Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, rural, watercolor, Wyeth