Mastery Of Color The Corbin Art Center Hosts The Nationally Touring Exhibition Of The American Watercolor Society

For the third time in recent years, the Corbin Art Center is hosting the American Watercolor Society’s nationally touring exhibition of watercolor paintings. The American Watercolor Society, founded in 1866 in New York City, holds an annual juried show for artists worldwide who devote their energies primarily to watercolor painting. The traveling exhibition is organized as an offshoot of this larger juried parent show, which is aimed at representing the “masters of the medium.” Indeed, previous participants include such notable art figures as Childe Hassam, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Andrew Wyeth.

In this group of 40 paintings, although little seems revolutionary, one sees a consistency of quality as well as a strong sense of people and place. With only a few exceptions, the majority of the paintings are representational, and the descriptive nature of the works springs from the painter’s deep focus on his or her subjects. The most powerful works convey that focus, such as Catherine Anderson’s “And God Created Fog,” in which moored boats, a lone wading bird, and apparent brushstrokes slip into the oblivion of fog, and “Victoriana,” by Irwin Greenberg, in which the substance and individuality of a young woman, and her interior domain, are captured by loose washes of color.

Many of the show’s selections were award winners in the parent show, and range in design and technique. For example, Mario Cooper’s “Maskarade at the Da’d’Oro” uses flat, bright color patterns and silhouettes to create the theatricality and fantasy of a stage set, whereas “Postcards from the Edge No. 7” by Betsy Dillard Stroud contains an explosion of color and movement that mimics life’s blur of experiences as captured on a postcard. In all of these works one appreciates the immediacy and precision necessary in the use of watercolor, as well as the fact watercolor cannot be worked and reworked over time like oil painting.

Due to the long and active history of the American Watercolor Society, this annual show has a following which is evident in the tours already scheduled to the Corbin Art Center from the Tri-Cities, Seattle and Canada.

The Corbin Art Center applies well over a year in advance in order to host this show, which in the past often went to a venue in the Seattle area.

Fortunately for Spokane, we will again receive the show in 1997 - but don’t wait until then to see it.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: THE AMERICAN WATERCOLOR SOCIETY EXHIBITION Through January at the Corbin Art Center, 507 W. Seventh. Call 625-6677 for information and gallery hours.