AQUACHROME and FRESH PAINT at Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH

http://www.manifestgallery.org/about/schedule.html

This show opened last Friday, but will be up for another month! My piece, Old Wood Butte, is on view there.

AQUACHROME
Contemporary Watercolor

With watercolor, you can't cover up the marks. There's the story of the construction of the picture, and then the picture might tell another story as well.  – David Hockney

-on painting a watercolor...
Make the best of an emergency.  – John Singer Sargent

Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.   – Willem de Kooning

Quite possibly the oldest form of painting, watercolor persists today, defying narrow categorization and broad stereotype. Practiced for centuries in concept development preliminary to 'finished' paintings made in oil or other scale-worthy durable media, watercolor also found favor with botanists, illustrators, and portraitists, and was applied to varied and countless surfaces.

The nature of the media itself represents a delicate and dictatorial transparency, fluidity, and a potential for expressive spontaneity. This not only makes it an ideal vehicle for contemporary art, but also one of training, intensity, philosophy, and play for any who practice it. Where an artist can easily dominate other painting media, forcing a will through viscous layers into a work of art like taming a wild horse, with watercolor there is dialog, compromise, and undeniable forthrightness. In this way the artist practicing watercolor works with a tiger in the room.

Manifest's several-member blind jury process reviewed 335 works by 139 artists. Seventeen works by the following 14 artists from Alaska, California, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and the countries of Belgium and India were selected for exhibition.

Presenting works by:

Winnie Sidharta Ambron
Columbus, Ohio

Carrie Callihan
Cincinnati, Ohio

Dhiman Dam
Hyderabad, India

Richard Diedrich
Atlanta, Georgia

Alexandra Dooley
Cedar Falls, Iowa

Melissa Gwyn
San Francisco, California

Nathan Heuer
Indiana, Pennsylvania

Tim Kennedy
Bloomington, Indiana

Garry Mealor
Anchorage, Alaska

Samantha Mitchell
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Roberto Osti
Flemington, New Jersey

Christopher St. Leger
Lockhart, Texas

Diane Szczepaniak
Potomac, Maryland

Wouter van de Koot
Antwerp, Belgium