The Art of Watercolour 36th issue - PRINT Edition

CONTENTS
Zoom on: “Lythraceae”, by Navin Tan
What’s on: Watercolour events from all over the world.
We were there: The 2019 Biennale of Brioude, France.
Call for entries: Try your luck in the next international competitions
Readers’ competition: The results of the Marine theme contest.
Readers’ competition winner: John Cooney
Readers’ competition runner-up:
- Ekaterina Sava
- Corneliu Dragan

PAINTING WATERCOLOUR
One theme, 3 artists: Charles Rouse, Ryan Fox and Joe Dowden share their points of view on preserving whites.
My last painting: “Hortensia and Delphinium”, by Sarah Yeoman, and “Morning Still Life” by Olga Litvinenko.

MEET THE ARTISTS
Portfolio: American artist Charles Reid, who passed away last June, was one of the most important and influential watercolourists of the 20th century.
Alexis le Borgne: A young and increasingly popular artist for whom watercolour rhymes with strength, spontaneity, light and subtlety.
Revelations: Galina Gomzina and Annick Malotaux.
Julie Gilbert Pollard: She has made rocky sites her favourite subject, and likes to use strong colours to create added sensations.
Marnie becker: Her works in which she pursues a modern approach to pointillism reflect the intense emotions she feels when on location.
Anne Baron: Letting the water flow freely, she depicts nature at its most mysterious and most powerful.
Raghunath Sahoo: This Indian artist is in love with his country and culture, which he portrays in poetic and yet realistic watercolours.
Face to face: John Cooney and Suzy Schultz, two artists facing reality.
Peggi Habets: Renowned for her ballerina series, she’s back with seom new watercolours.
Mikhail Starchenko: He loves nothing more than losing himself in the details of his hyperrealistic watercolours.
Face to face: Still lifes are a multi-faceted subject that allows artists to give their creativity free rein. Irina Zhunaeva and Domenico di Meco explain how they tackle it.
Jan Min: This Dutch artist loves rendering mysterious and misty atmospheres, revealing their latent poetry.

EDITORIAL
As we all know, today, information flows at the speed of a click on a keyboard or a swipe on a telephone screen. One piece of information, be it a picture or a video quickly gives way to another and social networks now seem to have become a bottomless well endlessly watered by these data streams. Who is in a position today to say whether this is a good or a bad thing? Perhaps we should rather see this as a genuine revolution that, brought to the scale of our watercolour world, could be compared to the invention of tube paints. It was thanks to these airtight containers filled with pre-prepared ready-to-use paint that outdoor painting flourished, leading to Impressionism and thus paving the way for modern art.
Plein-air watercolour is still basically practiced in the same way as Turner and his fellow artists did: a few brushes, a few colours and a sense of wonder in front of the subject, whatever it may be, which quickly becomes a need to paint it. On the other hand, what has changed today is the incredible platform provided by social media: many artists nowadays, their watercolours barely dry, promptly publish a photo of them, which will quickly travel the world.
The young generation of artists, such as Alexis Le Borgne to whom we have devoted a full feature in this issue of “The Art of Watercolour”, have perfectly assimilated this new dimension of watercolour: the latter spends a significant amount of time referencing his work on the Internet. For him, as for many others, production and promotion go hand in hand.