Discussions with Mark Norseth

Though it’s been a long time coming, I’ve taken the first steps towards rethinking my approach to painting in watercolor.

This is, for me, a big deal.  I’ve been working in the medium since I was a kid, and while I don’t pursue watercolor painting with the same industry as pastel and oil, it is part of my life and very appropriate for certain things I want to express.

The Problem

The symptom I’m responding to is an increasing restlessness, a desire to do something more stimulating and personal in the medium.  I like some of where I’ve been over the years, but I would like to see everything with newly overhauled eyes and  mind, if such a thing is possible.

Over time, I’ve arrived at a somewhat acceptable outcome for most of my watercolor works, which I seem to produce in a short spasm about twice a year, usually as a break from the bigger oil and pastel pieces.  Perhaps because of this lackadaisical effort, only about one in five paintings seems fit to leave the studio, and perhaps only one in those five do I consider among my best.  That’s one in twenty five. But what’s bugging me isn’t about  numbers.  It’s about something in my thinking and my process.

Last week,  I dedicated an entire afternoon to sitting alone with about five or six paintings from the last gaggle of wc’s I’ve done. For some reason each was a disappointment or even a failure.

Examining the group slowly,  I eventually realized a big part of the problem. My adoption and subsequent reliance upon the conventions of watercolor painting, (helpful standards that I had worked hard to learn over the years) were now getting in the way of my enjoyment of the work itself.  There were a lot of criteria I had ingested about what this sort of painting was about, and now it was getting hard to breathe.  It was time to lose some weight.

What to let go of?

I’ll go into that in my next post….

Painted on a recent visit into the backroads of Waimanalo, an agricultural community near our home, this little oil seems to communicate the qualities I was trying to capture.

The entire area is only slightly above sea level, and hedged in by the magnificent Ko’olau mountains, whose violet-grey tones are constantly in transition,  providing a marvelous backdrop to the foreground colors. The Backroads-Waimanalo 9 x 12″ oil on panel

Aside from composing paintings, which I consider my continuous and greatest challenge, I take a particular pleasure in trying to capture the effect of light and the color relationships revealed by it.  I’m happy to exchange some tidiness in the paint handling if I’ll get the sensation of what I’m experiencing in the bargain.  But if I can get both, I’ll take it.

I’m looking forward to getting some more things painted here.