January 2020

The Bloomington Herald-Times featured paintings by Bloomington Watercolor Society members in its Sunday, Dec. 29, edition.

Jan. 13 meeting

BWS opens new year studying

color palettes of master artists

Cassidy Young will present a lesson about the influential and interesting color palettes of master artists at the Jan. 13 BWS meeting. It will include a little about color theory, a little pigment history and some time to play, explore, mix, and catalog various color palettes for yourself. Various watercolor paints will be available for people to try, and some watercolor paper and supplies will be on hand. Bring your own water, brushes, a pencil and a sketchbook to capture the most detail.

Cassidy’s program will follow the business meeting, which starts at 6 p.m. at St. Mark’s Methodist Church, 100 State Road 46, Bloomington.

“We Paint…the Sweet Life!”

to benefit LIFEDesigns

What makes your life sweet? Family? Friends? A walk in the woods? Chocolate? Whatever it is, paint it and enter the first BWS exhibit of the year!

Best of Show receives $100 plus two tickets (Value $150) to the Art of Chocolate gala Feb. 22. Second Place receives two tickets, and participating artists will have their names entered into a drawing to win the remaining two tickets.

The new Art of Chocolate Cookbook, featuring illustrations by BWS artists and recipes from area chefs, will be available for purchase.

Jewel Evans, cellist, will provide entertainment at the Opening Reception during Gallery Walk Friday, Feb. 7 from 5 to 8 p.m. with awards at 6 p.m.

All sales benefit LIFEDesigns to support people with disabilities in south central Indiana, including housing, education and employment.

The Show Prospectus is available at http://bloomingtonwatercolor.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/The-Sweet-Life-Prospectus-2.pdf

Feb. 15

Judy Mudd to present workshop

on painting rural landscapes

The focus of Judy Mudd’s one-day workshop will be creating an artistic vision of a countryside scene including atmosphere, design and composition. Judy, a Louisville artist and teacher, has taught previous BWS workshops that have been very popular.

She is a juried member of the Southern Watercolor Society, Kentucky Watercolor Society, the Kentucky Arts Council’s Kentucky Crafted Program, Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen, and is an associate member of the American Watercolor Society, National Watercolor Society and the Portrait Society of America. She was named KWS Master Artist of the Year for 2019.

The Feb. 15 workshop runs 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. with a 45-minute lunch break. The workshop will be at the First Christian Church at the corner of Kirkwood Avenue and Washington Street in Bloomington.

BWS will fill the workshop with its members first, and if slots are available after Jan. 25, registration will open to non-members. The deadline for registering is Feb. 1. The cost is $89 for members and $99 for non-members.

You can register online at http://bloomingtonwatercolor.org/home/activities/member-shows-workshops/judy-mudd-workshop-2/workshop-registration/. Or you can register by sending your check made out to Bloomington Watercolor Society to PO Box 5236, Bloomington, IN 47404-5236. Please email info@bloomingtonwatercolor.org to let organizers know the check is coming and to reserve your spot.

Value does all the work;

color gets the credit

by Claude Cookman

It’s all Betty Wagoner’s fault.

Last July, Betty emailed me an announcement for David Lobenberg’s “California Vibe” workshop, scheduled for October in New Braunfels, Texas.

One look at his online portfolio and I was hooked.

After retiring from teaching at Sacramento City College, Lobenberg now spreads his vision of using color expressively, instead of descriptively, in workshops across the country. His mantra: If you get the values right, you can use any colors and the results will be convincing.

There is a continuum in watercolor: At one end, artists attempt to control the results with careful planning and the application of numerous glazes. In the middle are those who try to make watercolors behave like oil paint. At the other extreme are the “fast and loose” artists like Jean Haines, Ron Ranson, Grant Woods and Hazel Soan.

Their guiding principle: Put it down once and leave it alone. DON’T FIDDLE! Their method: Work wet into wet, letting the colors blend and dance. Their philosophy: Left alone, watercolors can accomplish much, much more than we can control.

Although not at the extreme, Lobenberg works close to this end of the continuum. He does use layers, but typically no more than three: the first to establish large fields of color, the second and third to add and refine facial features. The results are vibrant color abstractions, rigorous value patterns, texture you can touch and enough details and edges to make his portraits coalesce.

Hosting our workshop was the New Braunfels Art League. Bloomington is rich in privately owned galleries. Following a different model, artists in this San Antonio suburb formed a cooperative in the mid 1960s. They raised funds to buy an old store on the main street, renovating it into a downstairs gallery and upstairs studios and classrooms. Collectively, the members control their own exhibitions and sales.

From Oct. 3 through 6, more than a dozen of us gathered in one of those classrooms to learn from Lobenberg. The first morning he showed early watercolor portraits that established his mastery of traditional techniques. But copying reality grew boring, he said. He wanted to paint feelings. He eclipsed this early work with the explosive color of his “California Vibe” portraits.

Lobenberg defended his practice of starting these portraits by tracing photographs. Acknowledging that many artists consider tracing to be cheating, he argued it is necessary to skip the drawing step in order to get directly to the painting. He insisted his painting method constitutes art in itself, that it is difficult and deserves to be valued for its own sake.

That was the end of lecturing. For the next three and a half days, we painted. With energetic body movement, humorous patter and bravura brush work, Lobenberg practiced a simple but effective pedagogy: He demonstrated techniques and then talked us through them step by step.

He also used an innovation I have adopted in my own work — working on two paintings of the same subject simultaneously. This allowed time for the first to dry while we worked on the second. More important, it let us apply lessons we learned from the first painting — including mistakes we wanted to correct — to the second. Over time, Lobenberg paints numerous variations of the same face, each color scheme reflecting that day’s emotional response.

We started each painting by tracing a stencil onto a half sheet of hot press watercolor paper. Then we worked to make our color values match those in the corresponding black and white photograph. Copyright, David Lobenberg, 2020

For each portrait Lobenberg gave us a black and white photograph and an enlarged line drawing of the face and head including shadow, middle tone and highlight areas. Solid lines indicated hard edges; dotted, soft edges. We taped these stencils to windows and used soft pencils to trace them onto half sheets (15 X 22 inches) of hot-pressed watercolor paper. Most of these lines disappeared under the paint, but he was not reluctant to let some show.

We slathered on the paint, putting it down quickly with as few strokes as possible, then letting the colors run and blend. This phase required fluid washes, great restraint and large brushes. Lobenberg used a type of mop called a cat’s tongue. I worked with a two-inch Hake. After the first washes dried, we switched to smaller brushes to add features, hair and other details.

“Asian Girl.” In Lobenberg’s method, the watercolors do most of the work, creating dazzling color combinations that would be impossible to duplicate by trying to control them. Texture is created by back runs and flung paint. Although not always politically correct, Lobenberg’s titles do capture the “California Vibe” spirit. Many of the photos are of his students.

This unfinished version of “Asian Girl” shows the pencil tracing and near the right several light areas that were reserved with tape. Hair details were painted with a rigger. The bright slashes are opera pink gouache.

Paint consistency was extremely important. Lobenberg taught a scale of five levels of paint: tea, milk, cream, butter and straight from the tube. Knowing where and when to use which consistency was one of the workshop’s major skills.

For accents, he occasionally used touches of gouache.

At times, he had us follow his color scheme—he loved opera pink and lemon yellow. Other times, he encouraged us to find our own. Crucial throughout was matching our colors to the values of the black and white photographs. He frequently repeated the old truism: “Value does all the work. Color gets the credit.”

“Surfer Dude.” Before applying the first washes, I taped off the area around his eyes. Erasing with a stencil is shown in the hair at upper right. Painting through a stencil can be seen at upper and lower left.

Texture was another major element. We played with dry-brush, drips and runs, flinging paint, negative painting, back runs and taping areas to reserve whites. Lobenberg’s favorite texture technique involved stencils and Mr. Clean Original Magic Erasers. He taped a plastic stencil over a dense area of color, wet a spongy eraser and dabbed away the color. He varied this from a light lifting to rubbing back the area almost to paper-white. He noted the stencils could also be used additively by painting, instead of erasing, through them.

“Twentyth Century Jane.” After the initial washes dried, I flung paint across the cheek and neck, and then worked with a stencil negatively toward the upper left and positively at lower right. When that dried, I drew meandering lines with a soft pencil.

It is impossible to condense a four-day workshop into a brief article, but my classmates and I came away highly motivated with many new skills. My personal goal was to gain the methods and experience to work more loosely. Through Lobenberg’s teaching, I believe I succeeded.

I blame it on Betty Wagoner.

________________________________

If Lobenberg’s “California Vibe” approach interests you, explore the following URLs:

• His portrait gallery: https://lobenbergart.com/collections/60305

• An hour-and-a-half demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZlvkJpP–I

• His 2020 workshop schedule: https://lobenbergart.com/workshops

ArtBeat, a new community visual and performing art center, has opened in College Mall near Macy’s. It is a collaboration between Bloomington Arts Alliance and Bloomington Playwrights Project as a new site for classes and performance. BWS members Sara Steffey McQueen, Joanne Shank, Betty Wagoner, Nancy Metz, and Henry Leck are showing their work there.

Member News

The Burris family art show, “A Look at Relative Art …,” will hang at the Columbus Learning Center that connects IUPUC and Ivy Tech Jan. 24 through May 8. This is a collaborative family exhibit by Robert, Catherine and Lydia Burris. The Opening Reception will be Friday, Jan. 24 5:30 to 8 at the Columbus Learning Center, 4555 Central Ave., Columbus.

Betty Wagoner will have a show of her work at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 2120 N. Fee Lane, Bloomington, from Jan. 3 through Jan. 30. The hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays and Sundays between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. On weekdays, enter through the office entrance on the west side of the church.

Lynne Gilliatt‘s show at La Vie en Rose has been extended for the month of January. The address is 402-1/2 W Sixth St., Bloomington. It is the neon pink restaurant next to Bloomingfoods.

Beyond BWS

Kentucky Watercolor Society has announced the schedule for its 2020 AquaVenture, a regional juried exhibit open to members and non-members of of KWS who are 18 or older.

Artists may enter up to 3 paintings, but only one painting per artist will be accepted. Images must be submitted digitally by email to AquaVenture Chairperson, Trudi Bellou, at tfb344@aol.com or by mailing a CD to Trudi Bellou, 4308 Alton Rd., Louisville, KY 40207.

The entry deadline is Feb. 1 with notifications sent by Feb. 15. Accepted artworks must be delivered March 2 between noon and 2 p.m. or by appointment. The show will hang March 12- April 24 at LexArts/Arts Place Gallery, 161 N. Mill St., Lexington, KY.

For the complete prospectus and entry forms and fees, visit https://www.kentuckywatercolorsociety.com/page-2020-aquaventure-prospectus.

Calendar

Jan. 13, BWS meeting, St. Mark’s Methodist Church, 100 State Road 46, Bloomington (Program: Exploring the Favorite Colors Used by Master Painters by Cassidy Young)

Jan. 29, 10 a.m. to noon, Deliver “We Paint … the Sweet Life!” paintings to The Vault at Gallery Mortgage, 121 E. Sixth St., #1, Bloomington

Feb. 1, Deadline to register for Judy Mudd workshop

Feb. 1, Entry deadline for AquaVenture

Feb. 7, 5 to 8 p.m., Opening Reception for “We Paint … The Sweet Life!” The Vault at Gallery Mortgage, 121 E. Sixth St., Bloomington

Feb. 10, BWS meeting, St. Mark’s Methodist Church, 100 State Road 46, Bloomington (Program: Negative Painting by Carol Rhodes)

Feb. 15, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Judy Mudd Workshop, First Christian Church, Kirkwood and Washington, Bloomington.

March 6, 5 to 8 p.m., Second Reception for “We Paint … The Sweet Life!” The Vault at Gallery Mortgage, 121 E. Sixth St., Bloomington

March 9, BWS meeting, St. Mark’s Methodist Church, 100 State Road 46, Bloomington (Program: Capturing Night Landscapes by Kitty Garlock)

March 27, 10 to noon, pick up art from “We Paint … The Sweet Life!” at The Vault at Gallery Mortgage, 121 E. Sixth St., Bloomington

Bloomington Watercolor Society