Word: watercolor
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Spokane-born Kenneth Callahan came to his peculiarly regional style the long way around. At 16 he was a good enough realist to have a watercolor of the Seattle waterfront hung in a major exhibition. In 1926 he gave up both local notoriety and his studies at the University of Washington to go to San Francisco, where, between part-time jobs as grease monkey, bank clerk and restaurant waiter, he worked on his style ("There was nobody there to tell me I was wonderful"). Back in Seattle he tried commercial art. (Says his wife: "Kenneth's heart just wasn...
...school in his native England, Edward John Burra gave evidence of a highly individualistic approach to life. He daubed the noses of classical casts with red paint, took to washing his face in film developer. He also made himself a first-rate draftsman and a master of watercolor. Thus equipped, he took to wandering like a self-propelled vacuum cleaner into ugly corners of the everyday world, sucking up sordid impressions to belch out as nightmare pictures. Burra's brush can turn a gin mill into an outpost of hell, a whore into a rapacious owl, a bottle into...
Burra works slowly (more than a month to a picture) at a table drawn up to the window of whatever room he happens to occupy. He uses the largest sheets of watercolor paper he can get, sometimes pastes four together. Starting with a light pencil sketch, he lays in his flat, thick colors layer on layer, while keeping the contours crisp. Burra's end results generally have the sharp complexity of cactus, and the effect of an unpleasant, totally unexpected laugh sounding from below the cellar stairs...
Such preserves are the 296-artist show of the American Watercolor Society's recent annual and the ago-work Manhattan show of the National Association of Women Artists. Both are, in the main, muffled echoes of yesteryear. By contrast, Brooklyn Museum's aggressively progressive International Water Color Exhibition, showing the works of no U.S. artists plus a selection of French and Japanese water-colorists, is clear evidence that the abstractionist tide is still in full flood, with no ebb in sight...
...dean's office received from the Yale Freshman Dean's office a watercolor painting removed from the Harvard Union walls by an exuberant Yale freshman during the Yale weekend...