Watercolour Painting - A Reading List

At some point in your life you will likely be searching for the greatest watercolour painting book ever created. Here is a brief list of top contenders for your consideration when that day comes.

Conversations in Paint: A Notebook of Fundamentals by Charles Dunn. Conversations in Paint is really useful if you are trying to learn how to paint with watercolours. It won’t help you figure out anything practical like how to choose paints, or hold a brush, or mix colours or stretch paper. You’ll stumble through those things on your own.

Instead, this book will teach you something much more important. It will show you what ideas make the watercolour painting you are looking at work. It will help you learn to see behind the painting and understand what concepts and theories the artist used to create it. Dunn is like a rogue magician who decided to write a book explaining every abstract magician secret ever devised.

When you finish the book you will realize how blind you were before you started reading it. And then you will go back and reread it several times in a row and run to the local art gallery to stare in wonder at all the paintings you thought you had already seen.

Each two-page spread of the book covers a different idea like “relative clarity” or “balance” and includes many beautiful little watercolours to illustrate the points. In some ways the book is like an intense series of short lectures about watercolour painting. There is so much information here that it is sort of exhausting to try to read straight through. It's easier to absorb a bit at a time.

What I really like about this book is it’s no nonsense, painting to the people, demystifying tone. In the introduction, the author says “Talent is a myth..... Any adult can learn to express himself or herself articulately in paintings.” This is the guiding principle of the entire book, and he never loses track of this idea. The author ends the book with a side by side comparison of the first painting he did on location as an adult, and the most recent. The first looks like a child’s painting, but he still finds something to praise in it. The second painting looks like a real artist painted it, but his caption reads “.. it’s a long way from what I had hoped for. Well, maybe next time.”

This is a book that is both passionate and humble at the same time. It’s hard not to love that.

Watercolours by Winslow Homer: The Color or Light by Martha Tedeschi and Kristi Dahm.

In early 2008, the Art Institute of Chicago staged an exhibition of Winslow Homer’s watercolours. But it wasn’t just a standard exhibit of his astounding watercolours. This exhibit, and the book that emerged from it, is a detailed dissection of Homer’s painting methods.

The book includes exhaustive discussions of things like Winslow Homer's study of Michel-Eugene Chevreul’s colour theory, exactly which paints Homer used and how he mixed them, and a detailed analysis of every single watercolour technique he used to construct his paintings. This is a totally comprehensive review of Winslow Homer’s bag of practical tricks, which makes it a perfect companion to Dunn's more conceptual view of watercolour painting.

John Singer Sargent: Venetian Figures and Landscapes, 1898-1913 by Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray.

Like the study of Winslow Homer, this is a scholarly review of Sargent’s paintings in Venice from 1898 to 1913. Luckily, Sargent did a lot of jaw-dropping watercolour painting in Venice. The book is part six of a multi-volume collection of Sargent’s paintings. Each watercolour is accompanied by a few paragraphs of context and analysis. But the best part of the book is that many of the paintings are paired with photos of exactly what Sargent was painting.

It’s amazing to see how little Venice seems to have changed in one hundred years, and slightly bewildering to try to understand how Sargent was able to turn everything he saw into a watercolour masterpiece. Someone should do that for Toronto, if it hasn't already been done.

The Work of E.H. Shepard by Rawle Knox and Babar Goes to America by Laurent De Brunhoff.

These two books are great examples of what work-a-day illustrators can do with watercolours.

E. H. Shepard is the pen and ink genius who illustrated Winnie the Pooh and the Wind and the Willows, but he was also really good at painting his illustrations with watercolours.

As for Babar, when you read the book (which is illustrated in watercolour by De Brunhoff) you will find that Babar himself is a watercolour painter. He brings his painting kit and collapsible stool to America with him, but his annoying son interrupts his painting expedition.

“Babar is sketching on Fisherman’s Wharf. Pom, who has come with him, suddenly begins to cry. ‘My stomach hurts!’ he moans.”

The watercolour lesson here is to not have any children, because they will inevitably interfere with your on-location watercolour painting. Or if you must have children, to not have fat elephant children who will eat too much lobster and then whine about their stomach ache when you are trying to paint.