February 7, 2023

For and Against Tradition

I’ve recently produced images that, I believe, are some of the best I’ve ever produced. There’s only one problem – I broke some rules on the way there.

See, I’m a self-taught watercolourist. What does that mean? Well, I never went to art school, or got any significant in-person or ‘formal’ help toward improving my watercolour skills. I watched a lot of YouTube. I read a lot of books. I studied the great ‘masters’ and attended some local workshops. I also painted. A lot.

But, one thing that happens when the internet is your primary teacher is that it’s good at reinforcing itself. It only takes one ‘expert’ to give a ‘cardinal rule of watercolour’ on the internet and each and every pretender then passes on the same ‘wisdom’. For a communication medium that was supposed to be about accessing a diversity of voices, the internet doesn’t do a great job of it.

Here are some of the cardinal rules of watercolour that I’ve seen in multiple places on the internet:

  1. Never use paint straight out the tube, always mix it with a little bit of its complementary colour
  2. Never use fugitive pigments
  3. Never use white – leave it unpainted, instead.
  4. Only use watercolour – never gouache. Gouache is cheating.
  5. You only need 12 colours, just learn to mix everything else.
  6. Never clean your palette, the ‘mud’ will help soften colours.
  7. Don’t ‘draw’ with pencil. Mark up your composition but let the painting do the work
  8. Use as few brushstrokes as possible

And the list goes on.

It’s not just watercolour either. These arbitrary rules exist in art in general (I’ve written about oil vs acrylic before). I’ve spent so many years trying to adhere to those rules, to push myself and the medium as far as it would take my imagination and I’ve enjoyed the process thoroughly. The constraints of watercolour are often not limiting, but helpful. So what happened? Well, my imagination simply saw things that watercolour alone couldn’t achieve.

If I stuck to those “never” and “should not” rules, I wouldn’t have created the images I’ve just created. Why? Because… wait for it… I used acrylic and watercolour together! That’s right. A cardinal sin in any ‘pure watercolourists’ bible. I also did light over dark (oh no! two rules broken). I used gouache, more than 12 pigments, and I used ink for my outlines. Yeah, that’s right, once the flood gates were open, the water came rushing out.

What I didn’t find in any YouTube video was that the medium is exactly that, the *medium* – the passive materials that we use on our way to realising something bigger. The medium itself doesn’t care if you combine it with chalky gouache or plasticised acrylic (let’s not even mention acryl-gouache!) All that matters is me, he artist, answer the question I’m seeking to answer for myself. It’s a bonus if the viewer has the same question, too, because that’s where connection is made.

In the end, there are far more ‘normal people’ than ‘art critics’. So, when someone stands in front of your work, chances are they’ll not even give the medium a second thought… or even a first thought. But, they *will* feel something.

The art critic standing next to them might scoff at your ‘mixed media’ approach, or how you’ve ‘debased the purity of the watercolour medium’ but to them I say this; the watercolour pigments we use these days were not always around, either. If I don’t use *actual* ochre, or have my assistant grind and mix the watercolour for me, on site, is it still pure? Would Turner agree? Would Cezanne?

So, I’ve decided, there are no rules. All we have are the materials available to us in the tiny moment in time in which we occupy the Earth. The goal is then to make the work our brains are asking us to make, by whatever medium/s necessary. It’s a net loss to our humanity, otherwise.

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