Lead By Imagination

Craig Mitchell's Garden of Glass at Missouri Botanical Garden.

Of all the watercolor paintings I've attempted in the last year (my first year of watercolor), the aspens in autumn give me the most satisfaction. I've like very few of my watercolors, actually. Like the other paintings I've done, I found inspiration from a photograph. I chose to go wet on dry which I've not done in any of the other paintings. It gave me more control and in watercolor there really is no control, for me at least. The color depth, darks and brights were more manageable. I like aspen and birch groves so I'll be doing more of this subject.

I accepted the "art challenge" from Margherta Lahrman to help fill Facebook pages with art instead of fractured facts and ugly politics. My post included a photo of one of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings. “I applied streaks and blobs of color onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could...” --Wassily Kandinsky My favorite classes in college were art history classes. No surprise, since I hoped to major in art and design. Art history classes back then involved projecting loads of slides on a screen for the students to ponder while being enlightened by the professor expounding on the artists, the themes of the paintings, the techniques, and the conceptual meaning below the surface. When it came time to write my final paper, I chose Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian artist from the early half of the 20th century. In particular, I focused my thesis on one of the paintings in the Composition series, which he painted over...

Time for watercolor practice. The artist instructing us for this workshop hung up Chinese lanterns for our first lesson in applying the techniques she shared with us.