Sterling Edwards - Creating Luminous Watercolor Landscapes

I was strolling through an art exhibit years ago and stumbled upon an elderly gentleman doing a watercolor demonstration. I had always admired watercolor paintings and found them almost magical in the way colors melted together and ran in some areas while remaining bold statements in others. I watched as he wet the entire sheet of paper to the point where the water was literally dripping from the paper and off the edge of the table. I was particularly fascinated with the wet mixes of color that floated on his palette. He picked up one of his larger brushes and dipped it into a jar of water to saturate the brush and then dipped the brush in two of the colors. The suspense was killing me waiting for him to put brush to paper.

He put a small wood block under the paper to elevate the top. After a second or two, he quickly swiped the loaded brush across the top of the paper, resulting in an energetic explosion of running and fusing color. This was quickly followed with two more quick brushstrokes after which he turned to the spectators and stated that he usually did not work that hard on a sky. Lower jaws were hitting the floor as everyone stood mesmerized by the magnificent, loose-flowing sky that had just been rendered with only three brushstrokes.

In New Brunswick

Watercolor on 300-lb. (640gsm) cold-pressed Fabriano paper 15 22 (38cm 56cm)

At the time I was an oil painter and often spent a week or two painting a sky in one of my landscapes. I was a photorealist, and my measure of an exceptional artist could be weighed in how many hundreds of brushstrokes it took to paint a tree or some other element in a painting.

This isn't meant in any way to imply that photorealism is not good art because I know from experience that it takes years of observation and practice to master the process. There is a huge market and appreciation for photorealism and I was relatively successful. I guess my biggest concern was that I was not getting enough personal satisfaction from my paintings. Yes, they were pretty and yes, they were selling, but usually when I was about halfway through a painting. I became bored with the tedious and time-consuming process of painting each blade of grass in a fortyacre field or painting each leaf and branch in the forest.