A Visit to Winslow Homer

It was not high on my list of exhibits that I needed to see, but since it was available I took advantage of the opportunity to learn something about an artist whom I had not previously studied. The exhibit turned out to be an exhilarating experience. The technical exploration that Winslow Homer used told a story of inventiveness and use of art materials that was enormously satisfying to examine up close. The paintings are hung in a very intimate way so that it is possible to get very close to each one in order to see exactly how he achieved interesting effects by experimenting with different glazes, paint viscosity, color relationships, and the use of opaque and transparent paint, especially white.

I was especially interested in the very early paintings because they were very experimental in nature. By the time Homer was working in his mature water color style he was so adept at the various techniques that the sense of technical discovery within the art was no longer important. The paintings are extraordinarily beautiful. They manage to capture a sense of the moment because of his use of transparent and opaque watercolor paint. Each painting has a vibrancy and brilliance that make them sparkle even though they are displayed in very dim light in order to prevent fading that is a particular problem with watercolor paint. This ease and naturalness defines the watercolor medium perfectly.

After seeing the exhibit I was inspired to go home to my studio and take another look at some of the watercolor paintings I had been working on. Seeing Homer’s paintings directly resulted in my adding more contrast to my own paintings, especially highlights of white.

Winslow Homer began his career as an illustrator and became very adept at creating wood engravings and lithographs. His work as an illustrator during the Civil War stimulated him to be very inventive and creative in describing what he saw and transcribing his line drawings into prints. This printmaking experience was the background for his interest in working from dark to light and from light to dark. In lithography, a print maker has to scratch away the lithographic grease crayon in order to allow white to appear in the print. The lithographic system works because the grease drawn area will hold ink and the white area of the stone will not, so when the print is pulled, that area which has been either left white or has been scratched through to be white will print with white because it won't hold the ink. I recognized this way of thinking in his early watercolor paintings because of added white lines and areas created by using opaque white paint or scratching through the darker paint with a knife to reveal the watercolor paper.

Winslow Homer's added gum Arabic and other materials to increase the viscosity of some of his pigments in order to give them the body of oil paint. Scratching away of painted areas also was a technique I had not noticed previously. This exhibition allowed for very close inspection of the paintings. In addition, the Art Institute had an entire section of the exhibit devoted to the technical aspects of Homer's work. Art Institute of Chicago's Behind the Scenes has an interesting page devoted to this particular aspect of his art.