Watercolor  (like Paul) is just fine

One of the most interesting moments of the 1960s (to me) is the Beatle’s “Paul is Dead” controversy. This rumor was based on Beatles’ recordings that included a bit of incoherent mumbling  - which some fans, after smoking a little blunt and listening to the songs a few hundred times, reported that it was actually a coded message that informed fans that Paul was dead.

Many wept and clawed at their hair at the news.

Paul, of course, was not dead at all, but doing great. Which brings us to the point:  Once an idea gets going, no matter how nutty, it picks up its own momentum fed by an odd gravity that exists nowhere else except in the realm of human opinion.

Such momentum is today at work on the medium of watercolor. I often hear that watercolor is passé; no serious artist uses it except as a first-stage idea formulation. Then, presumably, the artist goes on to a ‘serious’ medium, such as oil or an electric bullwhip.

Back when I first began to dabble in the watery medium, I wrestled with it. I took workshops. I learned. I laughed. I cussed a little bit. And gradually, I improved a bit. What I didn’t know was that somewhere, in the base of a dormant volcano, the idea got going that watercolor was a second rate medium.

Oil is the most respectable medium, I am told. Acrylics will get you in the door, but can never been taken as seriously as oil. And watercolor? “We used to just have a bunch of old ladies painting watercolor boats around here,” an art aficionado once  told me. ”Now we have some really heavyweight artists around.”

“Heavyweight?”  I asked. “You mean, heavyweight as in ‘fat assed?” 

No, I knew what she meant. She meant that watercolor was the medium that grannies use while on holiday at Fig Harbor. They make muddled little paintings of sailboats adrift in poisonous green waters and they frame it when they get back home and then hang it over the mantle.  And Grandpa proudly points to this monstrosity with pride and tells everyone that granny painted it while on holiday, that she is a ‘real’ artist now.  

That’s what the woman meant.

Once, I got kind of blue over this whole bad-rap-on-watercolor. And, on a whim, I called up a famous watercolor illustrator that I admire. And he is a really, really nice guy. I told him how it’s unfair that watercolor and even ink is considered passé. After all, not a dozen human beings in the world could do the things that he does with a brush and a little watercolor. He should be fanned with palm fronds and fed dew-covered grapes by beautiful vixens.

He laughed it off. “But Jim,” here’s the thing: The world is as fickle as hell. You can’t live or die by the opinion of others.  You’ve got to find that one mode of expression, that one way of doing it, that makes you say “I can’t live without doing this.”  When you find that, then you’ll really be living, and have no regrets.”

Somehow, what he said clicked. I still see his work everywhere, and when I see it, I think of him and his advice. Just a guy doing the thing he couldn’t live without.

 

No regrets.