Inventing

Once in a while when trying out new materials--paper, canvas, paints and so on--my practice is to make studies to understand the physical properties involved. Late last year while working with a new kind of coated, heavy drawing paper, it occurred to me that perhaps it would be useful for watercolor. Light papers tend to winkle, or "cockle" when wet, but Legion Coated Cover paper felt heavy enough to tolerate the wetness. As a test, I made the small watercolor below and found it reasonably useful. To make the painting I used a reference shot of a city street but made it into an imaginary country road.

The reference photo (right) is considerably different, although the basic composition is almost the same. In the reference the street is rain-slick and the sky is dark, for instance. But in the painting I made the hill steeper, eliminated houses and driveways, and turned the street into a gravel road. So although the painting looks as if it was done on the spot outdoors, it's actually a studio experiment.