By Daniel Grant
In the survey course on art history she teaches at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, Camille LaPoint Lyons makes a point of stressing watercolors amid all the talk of oil paintings and sculpture.
“I try to show them watercolors by Turner and Sargent, Homer and Cezanne,” she says. “I let them know that the cave paintings at Lascaux in France were made from pigments mixed with saliva.” A watercolor artist herself who teaches a basic watercolor class for fine-art students at the school, Lyons is on a mission to improve the reputation of a medium that she believes has been stigmatized.
“Fine-art departments aren’t interested in watercolors and they actively discourage students who show interest in the medium,” she says. “I find it frustrating that it is so difficult to study watercolors in art schools.”
Most independent degree-granting art schools, as well as college art departments, don’t teach watercolor classes. By and large, painting means oil paints, or at least that’s the only medium in which the faculty is likely to have much knowledge.
At the Rhode Island School of Design, for instance, the only course for fine-art students that officially includes watercolors is the second-year Painting II course, which focuses on “experimentation in different painting media,” along with acrylics, oils and mixed-media. The professor teaching that class, David Frazer, really can’t help students who may have technical questions, because (as he readily admits), he doesn’t use watercolors, and he don’t really know how. He knows more about oil paints. If someone were to ask him a question, say, should they use tube watercolor paints or cakes, his response would be to refer students to other faculty in the illustration program, because they know more about it. (There are several courses for illustration students that feature or include the use of watercolors.)
Teaching technique, to Frazer, is synonymous with “offering a recipe or a formulaic approach to how to paint.” The lack of how-to technique-type instruction is OK at RISD, because, he says, “we generally focus on theoretical models and critical thinking. We let students experiment and let them show us what’s interesting and meaningful.”
The Rhode Island School of Design is hardly alone in this approach. At the Maryland Institute College of Art, Robert Salazar, co-chair of the painting department, “can’t remember the last time we had a watercolor course, but it’s been years,” although the department does offer a class in Sumi ink painting.
“My supposition,” he says, “is that watercolors—how should I say this in a way that doesn’t sound completely pejorative—is seen as something for little old ladies, not to insult little old ladies.” The type of painting encouraged at the school is “grittier, dirtier, faster, more assemblage-like, and watercolor doesn’t allow that. With watercolors, you need to be more patient, more in control.”
Get the point? This isn’t an attack on the watercolor medium itself or the many great works of art created in it; rather, the disdain for watercolors is part of a general assault on technique and traditional skill building.
Most schools offer, if anything, only a single course in water-based, or “aqueous,” media, which include acrylic, gouache, and ink, as well as watercolor. Certainly, there are similar issues of viscosity and the manner in which one uses these materials, but lumping them together means less time for each. Despite the fact that watercolors are less expensive than oil paints, easier to clean up after and more portable than oils, and we all used them when we were 5, as a medium it is just as difficult, if not more, to master. One semester just isn’t long enough, but there is no follow-up course to take. (At the Academy of Art University, Lyons teaches a Watercolor I and a Watercolor II class, but the Watercolor I course is the only one taught in a studio. The other is only offered online.)
As opposed to oil paints, various forms of sculpture, photography, printmaking, and that big category of electronica called “new media,” art students don’t get a second chance to develop their skills in watercolors, which is the first step toward marginalizing it. If students don’t get the hint from that, being sent over to the illustration department or getting told directly that watercolor is archaic will certainly discourage young artists.
With college-level courses unavailable, artists interested in watercolor must turn to instruction books, short-term workshops, or non-degree continuing-education classes offered by community colleges, universities, and art schools. Even the best author or instructor cannot make up for the lack of background that a four-year degree program offers, the classes in color theory, composition, drawing, and modeling; no quick trick taught in an instructor’s workshop can make up for that.
“You see gaps in a lot of our members’ work, because of a lack of professional training,” says Dick Cole, a past president of the National Watercolor Society, who also teaches workshops.
And the schools training those professionals seem fine with that gap.
“Most schools have dropped watercolor from the curriculum because of a stigma perpetuated by the watercolor societies,” Krause says. Karen Wirth, chair of the fine arts department at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, says that “when you say ‘watercolor,’ ‘amateur’ is what immediately comes to mind.”
“Artists I know don’t enter medium-specific shows,” says Wirth. “They might enter a painting show. That may define the difference right there between professional and amateur artists.”
But if watercolors are absent at those professional shows, the medium may be headed in a downward spiral toward oblivion.
Daniel Grant is the author of several books on the arts, all published by Allworth Press, including The Business of Being an Artist (4th edition, 2010), Selling Art Without Galleries (2006) and The Fine Artist’s Career Guide (2nd edition, 2004). He has been a features reporter at Newsday and The Commercial-Appeal, a contributing editor for American Artist magazine, and a regular contributor to ARTnews magazine and the Wall Street Journal.
(Photograph by Flickr user Magic Madzik)
