Painting in progress
Author: Liz
Liz Ehrlichman is an artist working in watercolor, oil, acrylic and collage.
Untitled
At Last a Painting – Fishing at West Neck Beach
In my last post, which was a while ago, I had a drawing of rocks and how they defined the land that was under them. I finally finished that watercolor and here it is!
New watercolor idea – first steps
This is the beginning of a new watercolor landscape. At West Neck Beach, it was low tide. I took a photo of a mostly empty beach with just a fisherman in the distance. West Neck is rocky. In making this preparatory sketch I realized that the rocks, by their position and shape, reveal the shape of the earth underneath them. It’s a really light pencil drawing – hope you can see it.
New watercolor idea
This watercolor painting of a beach on Long Island’s North Shore was made on a full size piece of handmade cotton paper from India. This paper is very lightly sized and the shape is just the way you see it in the image. I looked at it the other day and realized how much I liked the paper shape. I framed it without a mat, but adhered it to an archival mat instead. I love the shape of this paper. It is practically self-framing. Now I have to do another. I am choosing a favorite spot where marsh grasses grow near Caumsett State Park. I took a photo. Now all I have to do is begin.
New paper stapled to my board. I’ll wet it down to shrink it, but (sigh) will probably have to iron it again!
The Daily and the Nightly
These abstract watercolors were created in 2021. Covid seemed to be waning but my TV watching certainly was not! The paintings The Daily and The Nightly, while they are gridded color studies, also are about television and the news, the meaningful and also meaningless statements that resound in our heads and around the world. If you enlarge the pictures, you can see many of the circles or “globes” have written inscriptions. The words were culled from television, the news, and whatever else was going on around me.
The Daily
The Nightly
Finished and Ironed painting
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Well, there it is, finished. The ironing was not pristine, but was acceptable and the piece framable. I sprayed the back and then ironed it with scrap paper above and below it. Next time I will try without spraying the back.
More Watercolor Experimentation
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Fireworks on the Beach
Fireworks on the Beach 2
Fireworks on the Beach 3
I began this painting on a full sheet of watercolor paper. This time it was a handmade Indian paper with very little sizing. I put blobs of water down and floated the color into them. Once again, I did not stretch the paper or tape it to a board. The water made it curl up and make hills and valleys, all very irregular. I love that. It guides the color when you float it into the water, and makes very interesting shapes.
Because the picture reminded me of fireworks, I felt that it should have a background of night sky, and I set about creating one, after the fact, filling in the empty background areas with a dark blue-black color. Here I made some new discoveries. I found that if I wet the lighter areas enough, the clear water would eat its way into the dark blue paint in an irregular and spidery fashion. SEE THE IMAGE ON THE RIGHT.
I’m not sure of where this is all going, but I want to make the abstract shapes seem to be floating, translucent, like colorful lit up clouds. I’ll post it when I’m done. I know I will have to deal with straightening out the paper afterwards. Wish me luck.
Wet in wet watercolor, an exploration
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Weary of painting content, I have decided to explore what watercolor will do if allowed a little freedom to be itself. I splashed this paper with blobs and spatters of water. It is a compliant sort of paper – Strathmore Aquarius – and has the amazing quality of flattening itself out after you have painted on it, because it is a cotton and synthetic blend. Or almost flattening itself out, as you can see from the photo. I did wet it to start with, but used no tape for the edges. Then I floated bits of color into the wet areas and let the color go where it wanted to. I proceeded to add more water, more color, letting the whole thing take shape. I especially like where the edges of the blobs dry first and suck more color into themselves. I stopped early on this one so that I didn’t ruin whatever I thought was good about it with too much fussing.