Being Bold With Watercolour || Annette Kane
Quite a lot of the paintings in the book look more as though they have been done in oils or acrylic than in watercolour, which is interesting at a time when quite a lot of the traffic is in the opposite direction. What’s that, oil painting not coming out as oil painting? Well, a controversial view maybe, but those oil painting books that have been most successful are the ones that offer attractive pictures rather than worthy images that take themselves terribly seriously.
But, hey, we’re reviewing a watercolour book here, so lets get on with it. As a painter, Annette has an extraordinary variety of style and, as the title suggests, she’s not afraid to experiment. The pictures I was talking about above are mostly of gardens or buildings and they have a crispness that gives them an immediate appeal; they’re pictures no artist would be ashamed to paint and many would like to. Delve a little further and you realise just how much skill and technique have gone into them. The use of washes, granulation and wet-in-wet is much more than first appears and these are, when you get deeper, most definitely watercolours and no other medium.
As well as these, Annette also paints some quite extraordinary images which take watercolour techniques to the borders of abstraction. Painted very wet indeed, these include some quite surprising colours and blends that suggest quite extreme lighting and weather conditions. It’s watercolour, no doubt about that, but not as we know it.
Part of a series that Batsford are doing with the artist/writer Robin Capon, this book contains, as well as some stunning images, a lot of explanation. It’s not a how-to as such – there are no step-by-step demonstrations, but it will help any reasonably experienced watercolourist get to grips with the medium and take it a stage further. As the title suggests, all this is about having the courage of your convictions and being prepared to think painting, not medium, to work towards the end result rather than specifically to create a watercolour. It’s one to feed the imagination, for sure.
Year published 2006
List price: £17.99
Author: Annette Kane, Medium: Watercolour, Publisher: Batsford, Subject: Techniques