Blog reader (1833-1905) Daroo asked to see more gouache paintings by William Trost Richards. This 9x14 inch gem, called Lake Squam from Red Hill (1874) is from the Metropolitan Museum's collection, link.
Trost Richards combined the luminous grandeur of Turner with an American PreRaphaelite sense of carefully observed detail. He often worked semi-opaque watercolor over a gray-green tone paper.
Here's a plein air seascape that captures the full range of big waves, ripples, foam, and recoil. WTR is best known for his seascapes and his Adirondack mountainscapes.You can see a variety of WTR works for sale at William Varieka Fine Arts, link.
Another good website is "William Trost Richards, The Complete Works," link.
Wow these are amazing!
ReplyDeletesome of the best watercolor work i've ever seen, so much emotion and sould in these, phenomenal!
ReplyDeletethanks for posting these, i love watercolor paintings more then any other medium, so to find new extrodinary artists (well new to me) working in this medium is a real treat! thanks!
Mr. Gurney,
ReplyDeleteAre you familiar with Albert Goodwin? He's another great watercolorist, one of my absolute favorite landscape artists.
http://www.chrisbeetles.com/gallery/artist.php?art=1827
http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/art.asp?aid=3154
I enjoy watercolors a lot but there are few who's work I do like. If you like Richard's work then I suggest you take a glance at Henry Percy Gray. Not well known but a beautiful watercolorist nonetheless. From what I know of him he's part of the California Tonalist group.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting those. They're excellent and I've book marked the second link -- very inspirational -- It'd be great to see the actual paintings in person.
ReplyDeleteI think working on the toned paper really helps unify the color (sense of light) as long as you let it show through either by using semi transparent or broken opaque color.
Here's a contemporary painter I like, who has a slightly different approach -- he starts with transparent washes but then works back over them covering them completely with opaque paint (well except maybe leaving his darkest washes semi transparent). He then uses close value changes to soften edges and create atmosphere (like you mentioned yesterday).
Xiaogang Zhu:
http://www.saksgalleries.com/Artist
/Xiaogang%20Zhu/Xiaogang%20Zhu.htm
It just shows what a wonderfully versatile medium the watercolor/gouache combo is -- you can have anything from a mostly transparent, traditional looking watercolor painting with a few opaque accents, all the way to something that looks like an oil painting.