Monday, May 6, 2013

Stealing Other Artists' Tricks

Watercolor, 30x42 cm, approx. double letter size
Last week, my husband and I got on the train and visited Bremen, two hours from our home. In the Kunsthalle, a retrospective on the work of Wols is shown, a German artist who reached an age of only 38 and was a friend of the French surrealists. He lived in France and Spain, trying to emigrate to the USA on the run from Nazi prosecution. But he never got there. He survived the war and died from a food imposoning in 1951.
Funny: This exhibition inspired me although I did not like most of Wols' work. His older watercolor and pen drawings are no different from the things that all the people draw after smoking grass (no idea if he did). His later watercolors are extremely charming and remind of Paul Klee's work. His larger paintings are obscure and show a violent temper with the paint flung and splashed onto the canvas, they are carved with scratchings and big blobs of paint which must have taken ages to dry.


Detail of "A Friendly Little Flash"
I was very impressed by his watercolor techniques and tried them on this watercolor (above), my latest painting, double letter format. Title: "A Friendly Little Flash". I filled my rocks with petrified life this time.

Exhibition site

2 comments:

Yael said...


WOW - SO clever Eva!

I love the texture and I wonder HOW you achieved this! But then, I know how talented you are! It really looks beautiful.

I checked out this painter, and I must say, I do not fancy him very much. I did not find him Klee-like - Klee I fancy VERY much! :-)

Eva said...

My trick is to use very liquid, highly deluted paint and let it sit on the paper until it sinks in; this way, the paint concetrates along the edges of the "puddle".