| "I will still have
to go through even more failures, however - for I believe that with watercolour much
depends on great dexterity and speed of working. You have to work in the semi-wet to
create harmony and then you do not have much time for thought. It is therefore not a
question of completing things one by one, no, you have to put these twenty or thirty heads
on in succession almost simultaneously. Here are a few nice sayings about doing
watercolours: 'The watercolour is something diabolical', and the other words come
from Whistler who said, 'Yes, I did that in two hours, but I worked for years to be able
to do something like that in two hours.' But enough about that. I love watercolour
painting enough never to abandon it completely. I keep on dabbling in it repeatedly."
Vincent Van Gogh 1882 |
Vincent van Gogh
did watercolors? Yes! Here
are two VanGogh watercolor paintings to see how they develop through the years to what
we now recognize as his "style".
Primarily, he used watercolors to add color to his drawings and
even called his watercolors "drawings", as distinguished from his oil paintings.
He used the "simple colours" of ochre, sepia, sienna,
Naples yellow, gamboge, cobalt blue, Prussian blue, ultramarine, carmine, vermilion, white
and black. Initially he had trouble avoiding "heavy, thick muddy, black, dead"
paintings. He often used white gouache instead of water to lighten his colors - so many of
his paintings appear opaque. Black, he mixed with other colors, because he felt that
nothing was truly black, but "an endless variation of greys."
He became frustrated often - learning watercolors was slow and
hard and "keeping the paint fresh and transparent" was a problem. |
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