Watercolor Paintings With Quotes

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

according to my figures I've only had 2500 pieces of ass but I've watched 12500 horse races, and if I have any advice to anybody, it's this: take up watercolor painting.

Talking with you would be much more enjoyable than talking with Talia, Lilly.” His eyes scanned the floor by my feet. “She’s paint by number; you’re a watercolor.

and if I have any advice to give to anybody it’s this: take up watercolor painting.

Sometimes August thinks Jane looks like a watercolor painting, fluid and lovely, darker in places, bleeding through the page.

I don’t know anything about art so I can’t tell you that it’s watercolor or acrylic or that it’s on canvas or anything art related at all. I can tell you that it’s a painting of a hand, my hand, turned up and opened to the world and that it reaches into my body and rips out everything that’s left. Because in the palm, right in the center, is the pearl button I never reached.

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.

She’s paint by number; you’re a watercolor.

Julian's hand fell to his lap. He looked out over the water again. The wind tugged at his jacket. He closed his eyes and grinned. Below, the waves crashed. The moonlight painted him in shades of blue. His edges blurred like watercolors spilling outside of their lines.

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. But they are shapes, they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolors of perception.

So you decide, for the first time in your life, that you aren’t going to be one of the good girls anymore. You decide that “good” is not an adjective that ought to be applied to a person, as it only rendered you inanimate and inhuman, like a piece of cheese or a watercolor painting. The good girl is nothing more than a myth. We long for her for the same reason we long for utopia: Neither exists.

.” They gave Jesse all of Leslie’s books and her paint set with three pads of real watercolor paper.

All of the colors are amazing—some still linger at the edges of the sky, but when sunrise was at its peak, it felt like we were walking in a painting. Pinks, oranges, reds, purples, yellows, mixing together like watercolors. I thought I liked sunsets most, but I think I like sunrises better.

And the dark night of flow is an issue that society has not made particularly easy to handle. How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors—activities packed with flow triggers—because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like “career” or “children”? How many, now grown up and done with childish things, have put away the surfboard, the skateboard, the whatever? How many have made the mistake of conflating the value of the vehicle that leads us to an experience (the surfboard, etc.) with the value of the experience itself (the flow state)?

The child's face is close to her own now, but there is still no detail. It is a blur, a watercolor painting left out in the rain, the shades running, blending into one another. Only the eyes remain clear; black and hungry, jealous of life.

My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mother's horror, and he'd clap for trees that he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the fall.

But it was from him - with his cool, long sideburns and aviator sunglasses, and box of watercolor paints (and artist's paycheck) - from him we learned how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends.

Watercolor is, however, not jut a technique. It is almost an attitude. Watercolor always does what it wants. In a way, it is willful and anarchical.

The one question I specifically recall being asked was how a man as evil as Hitler could paint such delightful watercolors.

Hanna loved how the pencils and crayons looked, with their pointy unused tips. She liked the quarter-size circles of watercolor paint, like frozen puddles from a dripping rainbow.

If I were a pattern, I would be the pattern of paint that a bird would make if you dipped a bird’s wings in watercolour and then set the bird loose inside a paper lantern. I’m pretty sure that’s it!

He smiled against my cheek and kissed me again. "Talking with you would be much more enjoyable than talking with Talia, Lilly." His eyes scanned the floor by my feet. "She's paint by number; you're watercolor." Things like that, moments like those, how do you explain to other people that no one else in the world can make you feel this way?

That one was beautiful, though.” She flushes. “Thank you. I started taking classes a month ago. I like them, but I dropped out because all the teacher wanted me to paint were ugly, soulless little watercolor landscapes. No feeling! No passion!

How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors—activities packed with flow triggers—because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like “career” or “children”?

I’ll let you in on a secret. The secret to understanding colors is not so much knowing about their structure or the way they come into this world. The secret to using color is to understand the way we perceive them and what they mean to us. Theory remains theoretical, but practice is colorful.

unfiltered Camels, and box of watercolor paints (and artist’s paycheck)—from him we learned how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends. From him we learned how to make and give luminous parties.

Creativity is different than cleverness. Clever things are often fun, but usually shallow and short lived. Creativity is deeper.

The best way to find out if something needs to be in the picture is to leave it out.

The memories of him as a small boy and memories from my days at the dormitory seemed to bleed together like the shades in a watercolor painting

There is no right or wrong in painting. Every design decision contains countless possibilities and subtleties.

ten jars of oil paint, tins of watercolors, and different-sized brushes:

With her hair pulled into a loose ponytail, she looked softer, like she’d been painted in watercolors. Seeing Roxie like this didn’t help tamp the flutter in her chest even a little bit.

I like to work in watercolor, with as little under-drawing as I can get away with. I like the unpredictability of a medium which is affected as much by humidity, gravity, the way that heavier particles in the wash settle into the undulations of the paper surface, as by whatever I wish to do with it. In other mediums you have more control, you are responsible for every mark on the page — but with watercolor you are in a dialogue with the paint, it responds to you and you respond to it in turn. Printmaking is also like this, it has an unpredictable element. This encourages an intuitive response, a spontaneity which allows magic to happen on the page. When I begin an illustration, I usually work up from small sketches — which indicate in a simple way something of the atmosphere or dynamics of an illustration; then I do drawings on a larger scale supported by studies from models — usually friends — if figures play a large part in the picture. When I've reached a stage where the drawing looks good enough I'll transfer it to watercolor paper, but I like to leave as much unresolved as possible before starting to put on washes. This allows for an interaction with the medium itself, a dialogue between me and the paint. Otherwise it is too much like painting by number, or a one-sided conversation.

Reverence for the natural environment, and experiencing the interconnectedness between all things has long guided me to create watercolor paintings of beauty and spirit. Life's continuing adventure has led me into an exciting exploration into the wisdom and symbolic imagery of Sacred Geometry. These paintings act as a bridge between this reality and a metaphorical world of healing, continuity, and transformation. I use multiple transparent watercolor glazes coupled with image overlapping techniques, and sacred geometry to produce visions of a multi-dimensional reality. It is my intention to create art that embodies the vibration of Universal Love and expresses the joy and gratitude I feel for the honor of being part of this earthwalk." ~Blessings, Francene~

It took you twelve years to see that being “good” had gotten your piano teacher everywhere and you nowhere at all. So you decide, for the first time in your life, that you aren’t going to be one of the good girls anymore. You decide that “good” is not an adjective that ought to be applied to a person, as it only rendered you inanimate and inhuman, like a piece of cheese or a watercolor painting.

Young ladies sketched, did watercolors, wrote short paragraphs of imaginative prose. To Alexandra, there was a distinct and distasteful difference between one who paints and a painter, one who writes and a writer.

The old master oil paintings were usually done in transparent oil colors on top of a black-and-white underpainting, which was often painted in egg temperas. My version of this technique was to start with a watercolor underpainting, which is fast drying like tempera, but I have an easier time controlling it. Then I seal the underpainting with a coat of clear, matte acrylic medium. That keeps the oil paints, which come next, from soaking into the paper, where they would turn dull and flat. Instead, thin layers of transparent oil paint can be smoothed into glowing colors and bold, glossy surfaces, with a depth and space that I don’t think can be gotten any other way. It isn’t easy to do, but when it works, the results can still surprise me.

... she suddenly looks different to Olympia, physically different, as though a portrait has been alterred. And Olympia thinks that possibly such adjustments might have to be made for everyone she knows. Upon meeting a person, a sketch is formed, and for the life of the relationship, however intimate or not, a portrait is painted, with oils or pastels or with black ink or with watercolor, and only at a persons's death can the portraits be considered finished. Perhaps not even at the person's death.

Embracing our challenges and shortcomings illuminates the vivid pigments of our unique watercolor of life. With each stroke of difficulty and dribbles of weakness, we paint a beautiful masterpiece that is truly one-of-a-kind and stunning in its own way.

St. Petersburg’s wedding-cake mansions were an oil painting, Paris’s hôtels particuliers a watercolor. St. Petersburg’s skies were Technicolor, Paris’s a muted pastel. Petersburgians were hard, unyielding, while Parisians were—something else. Scanning my emails on the Métro, I

He's a Nethanderal! Behold the might of my caveman!" Mrs. Isaacs looked up at me, "I believe they're called 'Neanderthals', Hon." I looked down at my watercolor caveman, making a face as I felt like a Nethanderal, painting the wall of my cave. "Neanderthal just sounds so...Archaic.

Ma had painted the estuaries and sunsets in oils and watercolors so rich they seemed peeled from the earth. She had brought some art supplies with her and could buy bits and pieces at Kress’s Five and Dime. Sometimes Ma had let Kya paint her own pictures on brown paper bags from the Piggly Wiggly.

And even though she couldn’t write, Kya had found a way to label her specimens. Her talent had matured and now she could draw, paint, and sketch anything. Using chalks or watercolors from the Five and Dime, she sketched the birds, insects, or shells on grocery bags and attached them to her samples.

The idea of mixing pigments and gum arabic together to make watercolor paint is very old. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century the English chemists W. Winsor and H. Newton were the first to add glycerin to the blend to make the paints maintain a semi-moist consistency when stored in paintboxes.

They agreed they neither gave two hoots now as to how marriages were normally conducted. They would do as they pleased and run their lives by the roll of the seasons. In autumn the apple trees would be bright and heavy with apples and they would hunt birds together, since Ada had proved so successful with the turkeys. They would not hunt with the gaudy Italian piece of Monroe's but with fine simple shotguns they would order from England. In summer they would catch trout with tackle from the same sporting country. They would grow old together measuring time by the life spans of a succession of speckled bird dogs. At some point, well past midlife, they might take up painting and get little tin fieldboxes of watercolors, likewise from England. Go on country walks, and when they saw a scene that pleased them, stop and dip cups of water from a creek and form the lines and tints on paper for future reference.

Jennifer now understood the meaning of the cadence: the black and white drawing, the watercolor painting,and the notes. The cadence had at last developed into a concerto for violin, the instrument of gypsies, with a prevailing rhapsodic "leitmotif". The final movement had revealed itself when they were at the gypsy camp. And now it was complete.

the reason the average person is at the track is that they are driven screwy by the turn of the bolt, the foreman’s insane face, the landlord’s hand, the lover’s dead sex; taxation, cancer, the blues; clothes that fall apart on a 3rd wearing, water that tastes like piss, doctors that run assembly-line and indecent offices, hospitals without heart, politicians with skulls filled with pus … we can go on and on but would only be accused of being bitter and demented, but the world makes madmen (and women) of us all, and even the saints are demented, nothing is saved. so shit. well. according to my figures I’ve only had 2500 pieces of ass but I’ve watched 12,500 horse races, and if I have any advice to anybody it’s this: take up watercolor painting.

Laura Dillard." It seemed impossible that he could share this with Catherine Marks, but she seemed to object he would. And somehow he was obliging her. "Beautiful girl. She loved to watercolor. Few people are good at that, they're too afraid of making mistakes. You can't lift the color or hide it, once it's put down. And water is unpredictable- an active partner in the painting- you have to let it behave as it will. Sometimes the color diffuses in ways you don't expect, or one shade backruns into another. That was fine with Laura. She liked the surprises of it. We had known each other all during childhood. I went away for two years to study architecture, and when I came back, we fell in love. So easily. We never argued- there was nothing to argue over. Nothing in our way.

If the seasons bleed into each other like a watercolor painting, it means not enough fish and berries to last the winter, not enough wood chopped for the stove, not enough meat in the freezer. One year winter came so fast and so hard, the leaves on the birch trees didn't even have time to turn yellow and fall off; they froze solid green on the branches. They clung there for months on skinny skeleton arms, the color so blindingly wrong it was creepy. Every year it's a race between the seasons, and that year fall lost.

Tea Rose (Perfumer's Workshop) **** green rose $ Composed in 1972, Tea Rose was the first fragrance signed by the great Annie Buzantian (Pleasures), and was in many ways the first niche fragrance: the Perfumer's Workshop did nothing but fragrances, had a small range, was fairly hard to find, and had a devoted following. Tea Rose was and is a rose soliflore that illustrates how complex a composition must be before it can actually claim to smell of rose. The rose it depicts is huge, painted in watercolor, and has the species name written below it in cursive. LT

(About Georgia O'Keeffe) At the Art Students League in New York one of her fellow students advised her that, since he would be a great painter and she would end up teaching painting in a girs' school, any work of hers was less important than modeling for him. Another painted over her work to show her how the Impressionists did trees. She had not before heard how the Impressionists did trees and she did not much care. At twenty-four she left all those opinions behind and went for the first time to live in Texas, where there were no trees to paint and no one to tell her how not to paint them. In Texas there was only the horizon she craved. In Texas she had her sister Claudia with her for a while, and in the late afternoons they would walk away from town and toward the horizon and watch the evening star come out. "That evening star fascinated me," she wrote. "It was in some way very exciting to me. My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. Ten watercolors were made from that star.

What’s white people? I’m blind. Never seen the color white in my life. Or the color black, blue, or gray for that matter. To a blind man, color means nothing. My ma used to tell me that the world is like a glorious set of watercolor paints laid out in a hand crafted palette. Sure wish I could see what that is. She made is sound special. The only things I can see are bad people, good people, and those in between. The bad ones you can easily avoid, but those in between people are the worst because you never know when they’ll help you up and when they’ll kick you in the teeth. So ask me instead if I hate people, and I will tell you that some are deserving of hate and others not.

What if even then, God had plans for a second garden? Another tree, and another chance to reach out and accept the abundance of life? What if in Eden, God was planning Gethsemane?" The question echoed through Lucy, growing in power with each reverberation within her soul. She held a flower in her hands. The sweet, exotic perfume floated deep into Lucy's heart---carrying Ms. Beth's words right along beside it. Lucy hesitated, allowing the words to take effect. "Are you circling a closed Eden, or have you chosen to step into Gethsemane, through the open gate?" Lucy blinked. She had never thought of it like that. "Maybe what you thought was a closed gate meant to punish you is actually God's way of protecting you from remaining in a place where you won't and can't receive His life." The truth washed Lucy's heart with color. As it brushed over the harsh edges with water, watercolor blooms began to blend one into the other, filling her with understanding. Lucy's heart swelled as the long-dry soil soaked up this water. "Where you're preoccupied with your failures and your fears and the desire to preserve all you might lose, God has a plan to preserve something else. To root you in a place where life can grow within you once more, freely and abundantly. A garden of death for a garden of life, where through His own resurrection Jesus returns all that was stolen.

Sal and Henry return with a gust of warm garden air and I settle down to create miniature roses from sugarpaste using tiny ivory spatulas and crimpers. I will have no antique tester bed crowning my cake, only a posy of flowers: symbols of beauty and growth, each year new-blossoming. I let Henry paint the broken pieces with spinach juice, while I tint my flowers with cochineal and yellow gum. As a pretty device I paint a ladybird on a rose, and think it finer than Sèvres porcelain. At ten o'clock tomorrow, I will marry John Francis at St. Mark's Church, across the square. As Sal and I rehearse our plans for the day, pleasurable anticipation bubbles inside me like fizzing wine. We will return from church for this bride cake in the parlor, then take a simple wedding breakfast of hot buttered rolls, ham, cold chicken, and fruit, on the silver in the dining room. Nan has sent me a Yorkshire Game Pie, so crusted with wedding figures of wheatsheafs and blossoms it truly looks too good to eat. We have invited few guests, for I want no great show, and instead will have bread and beef sent to feed the poor. And at two o'clock, we will leave with Henry for a much anticipated holiday by the sea, at Sandhills, on the southern coast. John Francis has promised Henry he might try sea-bathing, while I have bought stocks of cerulean blue and burnt umber to attempt to catch the sea and sky in watercolor.

she grew up with a frail talent in the more genteel arts, and no knowledge of the necessity of living from day to day. Her needlepoint was delicate and useless, she painted misty landscapes of thin water-color washes, and she played the piano with a forceless but precise hand; yet she was ignorant of her own bodily functions, she had never been alone to care for her own self one day of her life, nor could it ever have occurred to her that she might become responsible for the well-being of another. Her life was invariable, like a low hum; and it was watched over by her mother, who, when Edith was a child, would sit for hours watching her paint her pictures or play her piano, as if no other occupation were possible for either of them.

Many of the gifts were for me. There were jewels and gowns and furs and paintings--- done on ice canvases that made everything bleed together far more than watercolors---and a strange, empty box with a base of some sort of pale velvet that the faerie claimed would sprout white roses with diamonds in them if left outside at midday, and blue roses with rubies if left outside at midnight. There were other nonsensical presents along these lines, including a saddle of shapeless grey leather that would allow me to ride the mountain fog, though no explanation was given as to why I should wish to do this. The only presents I truly appreciated came in the form of ice cream, which the Hidden Ones are obsessed with and cover with sea salt and nectar from their winter flowers.

Several years ago, I was invited to deliver a lecture on art and literature to the Tinworth Historical Society. While searching in the attic for a treatise of mine written during my student days at the Sorbonne, I came upon a large, dust-and-cobweb-covered trunk bearing the initials W.W. which I had never before noticed. Inside were stacks of paper tied in neat bundles and a large quantity of fascinating memorabilia - faded flowers, old invitations, scraps of satin, velvet and lace, postage stamps, jewelry, postcards from foreign capitals. The variety was endless. As I examined several bundles of paper more carefully, I realized I was holding a collection of drawings by Amelia Woodmouse, a promising young artist and a member of the family who had lived in the house at the turn of the century. From the delightful portraits and paintings depicting the life around her, and the accumulation of personal mementos, it was obvious that the artist had begun her collection in order to compile a family album, which for some reason, sadly, she never completed.

per hour. Handbrake knew that he could keep up with the best of them. Ambassadors might look old-fashioned and slow, but the latest models had Japanese engines. But he soon learned to keep it under seventy. Time and again, as his competitors raced up behind him and made their impatience known by the use of their horns and flashing high beams, he grudgingly gave way, pulling into the slow lane among the trucks, tractors and bullock carts. Soon, the lush mustard and sugarcane fields of Haryana gave way to the scrub and desert of Rajasthan. Four hours later, they reached the rocky hills surrounding the Pink City, passing in the shadow of the Amber Fort with its soaring ramparts and towering gatehouse. The road led past the Jal Mahal palace, beached on a sandy lake bed, into Jaipur’s ancient quarter. It was almost noon and the bazaars along the city’s crenellated walls were stirring into life. Beneath faded, dusty awnings, cobblers crouched, sewing sequins and gold thread onto leather slippers with curled-up toes. Spice merchants sat surrounded by heaps of lal mirch, haldi and ground jeera, their colours as clean and sharp as new watercolor paints. Sweets sellers lit the gas under blackened woks of oil and prepared sticky jalebis. Lassi vendors chipped away at great blocks of ice delivered by camel cart. In front of a few of the shops, small boys, who by law should have been at school, swept the pavements, sprinkling them with water to keep down the dust. One dragged a doormat into the road where the wheels of passing vehicles ran over it, doing the job of carpet beaters. Handbrake honked his way through the light traffic as they neared the Ajmeri Gate, watching the faces that passed by his window: skinny bicycle rickshaw drivers, straining against the weight of fat aunties; wild-eyed Rajasthani men with long handlebar moustaches and sun-baked faces almost as bright as their turbans; sinewy peasant women wearing gold nose rings and red glass bangles on their arms; a couple of pink-faced goras straining under their backpacks; a naked sadhu, his body half covered in ash like a caveman. Handbrake turned into the old British Civil Lines, where the roads were wide and straight and the houses and gardens were set well apart. Ajay Kasliwal’s residence was number

I’ll go myself,” the sergeant said tersely. He was getting annoyed. The stairway went down underneath the ground floor to a depth of about eight feet. A short paved corridor ran in front of the boiler room at right angles to the stairs, where each end was closed off by unpainted panelled doors. Both the stairs and the corridor felt like loose gravel underfoot, but otherwise they were clean. Splotches of blood were more in evidence in the corridor and a bloody hand mark showed clearly on the unpainted door to the rear. “Let’s not touch anything,” the sergeant cautioned, taking out a clean white handkerchief to handle the doorknob. “I better call the fingerprint crew,” the photographer said. “No, Joe will call them; I’ll need you. And you local fellows better wait outside, we’re so crowded in here we’ll destroy the evidence.” “Ed and I won’t move,” Grave Digger said. Coffin Ed grunted. Taking no further notice of them, the sergeant pushed open the door. It was black and dark inside. First he shone his light over the wall alongside the door and all over the corridor looking for electric light switches. One was located to the right of each door. Taking care to avoid stepping in any of the blood splotches, the sergeant moved from one switch to another, but none worked. “Blown fuse,” he muttered, picking his way back to the open room. Without having to move, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed could see all they wanted through the open door. Originally made to accommodate a part-time janitor or any type of laborer who would fire the boiler for a place to sleep, the room had been converted into a pad. All that remained of the original was a partitioned-off toilet in one corner and a washbasin in the other. An opening enclosed by heavy wire mesh opened into the boiler room, serving for both ventilation and heat. Otherwise the room was furnished like a boudoir. There was a dressing-table with a triple mirror, three-quarter bed with chenille spread, numerous foam-rubber pillows in a variety of shapes, three round yellow scatter rugs. On the whitewashed walls an obscene mural had been painted in watercolors depicting black and white silhouettes in a variety of perverted sex acts, some of which could only be performed by male contortionists. And everything was splattered with blood, the walls, the bed, the rugs. The furnishings were not so much disarrayed, as though a violent struggle had taken place, but just bloodied. “Mother-raper stood still and let his throat be cut,” Grave Digger observed. “Wasn’t that,” Coffin Ed corrected. “He just didn’t believe it is all.

When was the last time you made something that someone wasn’t paying you for, and looking over your shoulder to make sure you got it right?” When I ask creatives this question, the answer that comes back all too often is, “I can’t remember.” It’s so easy for creativity to become a means to a very practical end—earning a paycheck and pleasing your client or manager. But that type of work only uses a small spectrum of your abilities. To truly excel, you must also continue to create for the most important audience of all: yourself. In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron discusses a now well-known practice that she calls “morning pages.” She suggests writing three pages of free-flowing thought first thing in the morning as a way to explore latent ideas, break through the voice of the censor in your head, and get your creative juices flowing. While there is nothing immediately practical or efficient about the exercise, Cameron argues that it’s been the key to unlocking brilliant insights for the many people who have adopted it as a ritual. I’ve seen similar benefits of this kind of “Unnecessary Creation” in the lives of creative professionals across the board. From gardening to painting with watercolors to chipping away at the next great American novel on your weekends, something about engaging in the creative act on our own terms seems to unleash latent passions and insights. I believe Unnecessary Creation is essential for anyone who works with his or her mind.

A Lake Charles-based artist, Sally was a progressive Democrat who in 2016 primary favored Bernie Sanders. Sally's very dear friend and worl-traveling flight attendant from Opelousas, Louisiana, Shirley was an enthusiast for the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Both woman had joined sororities at LSU. Each had married, had three children, lived in homes walking distance apart in Lake Charles, and had keys to each other's houses. Each loved the other's children. Shirley knew Sally's parents and even consulted Sally's mother when the two go to "fussing to much." They exchanged birthday and Christmas gifts and jointly scoured the newspaper for notices of upcoming cultural events they had, when they were neighbors in Lake Charles, attended together. One day when I was staying as Shirley's overnight guest in Opelousas, I noticed a watercolor picture hanging on the guestroom wall, which Sally had painted as a gift for Shirley's eleven-year-old daughter, who aspired to become a ballerina. With one pointed toe on a pudgy, pastel cloud, the other lifted high, the ballerina's head was encircled by yellow star-like butterflies. It was a loving picture of a child's dream--one that came true. Both women followed the news on TV--Sally through MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and Shirley via Fox News's Charles Krauthammer, and each talked these different reports over with a like-minded husband. The two women talk by phone two or three times a week, and their grown children keep in touch, partly across the same politcal divide. While this book is not about the personal lives of these two women, it couldn't have been written without them both, and I believe that their friendship models what our country itself needs to forge: the capacity to connect across difference.

Quickly she shredded the cabbage on the chopping block and tossed it along with the onion and tomatoes in a blue Pyrex bowl. Then she slid the lamb chops, encrusted with fresh rosemary, into the oven. While the lamb baked, she brushed her hair in the washroom and pinned it back again. Then she zipped on a silk floral dress she'd purchased in Bristol and retrieved her grandmother's rhinestone necklace, one of the few family heirlooms her mother packed for her, to clasp around her neck. At the foot of the bed was the antique trunk she'd brought from her childhood home in Balham more than a decade ago. Opening the trunk, she removed her wedding album along with her treasured copy of 'The Secret Garden' and the tubes of watercolors her father had sent with her and her brother. Her father hoped she would spend time painting on the coast, but Maggie hadn't inherited his talent or passion for art. Sometimes she wondered if Edmund would have become an artist. Carefully she took out her newest treasures- pieces of crystal she and Walter hd received as wedding presents, protected by pages and pages of her husband's newspaper. She unwrapped the crystal and two silver candlesticks, then set them on the white-cloaked dining table. She arranged the candlesticks alongside a small silver bowl filled with mint jelly and a basket with sliced whole-meal bread from the bakery. After placing white, tapered candles into the candlesticks, she lit them and stepped back to admire her handiwork. Satisfied, she blew them out. Once she heard Walter at the door, she'd quickly relight the candles. When the timer chimed, she removed the lamb chops and turned off the oven, placing the pan on her stovetop and covering it with foil. She'd learned a lot about housekeeping in the past decade, and now she was determined to learn how to be the best wife to Walter. And a doting mother to their children. If only she could avoid the whispers from her aunt's friends.

There is no fault that can’t be corrected [in natural wine] with one powder or another; no feature that can’t be engineered from a bottle, box, or bag. Wine too tannic? Fine it with Ovo-Pure (powdered egg whites), isinglass (granulate from fish bladders), gelatin (often derived from cow bones and pigskins), or if it’s a white, strip out pesky proteins that cause haziness with Puri-Bent (bentonite clay, the ingredient in kitty litter). Not tannic enough? Replace $1,000 barrels with a bag of oak chips (small wood nuggets toasted for flavor), “tank planks” (long oak staves), oak dust (what it sounds like), or a few drops of liquid oak tannin (pick between “mocha” and “vanilla”). Or simulate the texture of barrel-aged wines with powdered tannin, then double what you charge. (““Typically, the $8 to $12 bottle can be brought up to $15 to $20 per bottle because it gives you more of a barrel quality. . . . You’re dressing it up,” a sales rep explained.) Wine too thin? Build fullness in the mouth with gum arabic (an ingredient also found in frosting and watercolor paint). Too frothy? Add a few drops of antifoaming agent (food-grade silicone oil). Cut acidity with potassium carbonate (a white salt) or calcium carbonate (chalk). Crank it up again with a bag of tartaric acid (aka cream of tartar). Increase alcohol by mixing the pressed grape must with sugary grape concentrate, or just add sugar. Decrease alcohol with ConeTech’s spinning cone, or Vinovation’s reverse-osmosis machine, or water. Fake an aged Bordeaux with Lesaffre’s yeast and yeast derivative. Boost “fresh butter” and “honey” aromas by ordering the CY3079 designer yeast from a catalog, or go for “cherry-cola” with the Rhône 2226. Or just ask the “Yeast Whisperer,” a man with thick sideburns at the Lallemand stand, for the best yeast to meet your “stylistic goals.” (For a Sauvignon Blanc with citrus aromas, use the Uvaferm SVG. For pear and melon, do Lalvin Ba11. For passion fruit, add Vitilevure Elixir.) Kill off microbes with Velcorin (just be careful, because it’s toxic). And preserve the whole thing with sulfur dioxide. When it’s all over, if you still don’t like the wine, just add a few drops of Mega Purple—thick grape-juice concentrate that’s been called a “magical potion.” It can plump up a wine, make it sweeter on the finish, add richer color, cover up greenness, mask the horsey stink of Brett, and make fruit flavors pop. No one will admit to using it, but it ends up in an estimated 25 million bottles of red each year. “Virtually everyone is using it,” the president of a Monterey County winery confided to Wines and Vines magazine. “In just about every wine up to $20 a bottle anyway, but maybe not as much over that.

...and my professional idol Vanessa Redgrave. There is a quality about Vanessa that makes me feel as if she resides in a nether-world of mystery that eludes the rest of us mortals. Her voice seems to come from some deep place that knows all suffering and all secrets. Watching her work is like seeing through layers of glass, each layer painted in mythic watercolor images, layer after layer, until it becomes dark—but even then you know you haven’t come to the bottom of it.

Water Source and earthbound substance in endless theme and variation.  There is need of rest, renewal and appreciation of the ever-changing landscape. 

The wall between writing and painting is just good grammar. Moderation in moderation. Fun is scary with a happy ending. Just love. If love doesn’t transform that which annoys you, it will be easier to tolerate.

Her eyes flashed up at him, then back down at the box. She opened it eagerly. Inside lay the cameo necklace he had seen the new housemaid pawn at a shop in Weavering Street. “You bought it back for me,” she breathed, eyes shining. “You have no idea what this means—it was a gift from my father.” He nodded. “There is more.” She looked inside the box again. Under the cameo lay a piece of thick paper. She extracted it and handed him the box to hold. She turned the paper over, revealing the small watercolor of Lime Tree Lodge. Her brow puckered. “Thank you, but you might have kept it. I wouldn’t have minded.” He tucked his chin as though offended, and insisted, “I spent a great deal of money on it.” “On this?” She raised her fair brows, incredulous. “Not on the painting. On Lime Tree Lodge itself.” She stared at him, stunned. “You didn’t . . .” “I did.” “But . . . my solicitor told me some vicar was very keen on buying it.” “He was. But I was keener.” “How did you . . . Forgive me, but I know you needed every shilling for Fairbourne Hall and to repair your ship.” “True.” “Then, how?” “I sold my ship. The damage did not lower its value as much as I had feared, and it brought a good price. Besides, I have no need of it any longer.

It’s the kind of beauty only God can create, sweetheart. Nothing in life can compare. You’ll never see anything as beautiful as the scattered colors that float across the sky. Every sunset is like a watercolor painting God made just for you. It’s a gift, but sometimes people get so busy they forget to appreciate what’s given to them every day.

Still—in a way—nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. —Georgia O’Keefe

See, I have this theory that humans are just living, breathing, talking forms of art, each crafted with a different technique and carved out of different materials. Each beautiful in their own way. And sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and totally subjective, and changes depending on your circumstance, yada-yada-yada… but most of the time, it’s pretty easy to classify people. Like, okay, you know those women who are gorgeous and never know it? Or the men who pass quietly through life, handsome and unnoticed, never begging for attention or crying out for recognition? Those are your watercolors. And the loud, vivacious, gorgeous-and-they-know-it creatures, with bright lipstick and closets full of bold colors and outfits they never wear twice? Acrylics. The graceful, elegant, aging beauties you pick out in the crowd, or across the cafe, the lines on their faces telling a story you just know you’d want to hear, with so many layers and smudges, twists and turns, you’re not even sure where they begin? Charcoals. Then, you’ve got the big-picture-beautiful people, with the collection of interesting features that together make a beautiful face. They’re your oil paintings — best from ten feet away and, at the end of the day, kind of funny looking if you lean closer and analyze all their elements separately. But I’m quickly learning that Chase Croft doesn’t fit any of my categories. He isn’t a brushstroke on canvas, or bumpy layers of paint on a palette, or imperfect lines scratched inside a sketchbook. His features aren’t just gorgeous as a collective — he’s one of those annoyingly attractive people whose every feature is equally stunning. He’s a sculpture.

If I sacrifice the simple beauty of the paint for accuracy or complexity, I have made a bad bargain.

Jimena stopped in front of a locker near a floor-length mirror. "This one was Catty's," she said softly. A watercolor painting of the full moon rising over an ocean was taped to the front. A beautiful woman hovered behind the moon, her purple robe billowing into the starry sky behind her. The image was haunting. "Did she do the painting?" Tianna asked. "It's really pretty." Jimena nodded. "She was a good artist.

I want to help people get a job.” “I want to help people paint their first watercolor painting.

Help teenagers acclimate to college. Help people paint their first watercolor painting. Indeed, each of these phrases is full of keywords!

Annie Tulloch changing herself into a watercolor miss indistinguishable from any other woman felt wrong. Her reasons for doing so felt worse, like destroying a vivid Goya painting to sell a common gilt frame.

Her attic was filled with these boxes. At one point she wanted to turn the attic into an art studio so she could take up watercolor painting, a lifelong dream. But she never went through with it because she had nowhere else to store all those beautiful clothes. As it turned out, two of her daughters never married or had children, and the third had five boys. Now Betty can no longer make it up the attic steps, and those clothes sit in those boxes, growing more musty and moth-chewed by the year.

Isaac took a long swig from the unmarked bottle. He'd tasted her cider before, but this bottle was completely different, yet just as wonderful. The apple was more prominent, yet not sweet, almost funky but in a good, blue-cheese way. He held the bottle up to the light and could see the sediment swirling in the bottom. "This is amazing- so different from the other one." Sanna grinned. "You really like Olive? I wasn't sure when I blended it. Not everyone likes the murkiness." "Olive?" Sanna leaned against the counter, putting her weight on her wrist as she studied him for a long moment, her eyes squinting. She took a long drink from her own bottle. "I see colors when I make ciders. I can't explain it. Each juice has its own hue. That's what those paintings represent." She pointed at the watercolors over the fireplace. "A new color comes to me, and I blend the juices until I can re-create it in the flavor. And this one is Olive." "You color-code your ciders?" He struggled to understand what she was telling him. "No." She reached across the counter and pulled her journal toward her. She opened it and handed it to Isaac. As she sipped her cider, he studied the page, then the next page, then the next. On each was a swatch of layered color, all wildly different from one another- reds, greens, teals, colors he didn't really have names for. Next to the colors were measurements, apple varieties, percentages, and flavor notes. Scribbles filled the margins and equations contained both numbers and words. Things like sugars and acidity were measured and tested. It was part recipe book, part coloring book, and part wine label, with a hint of spell book. Looking at it was like opening a tiny door into the back of her head. She saw things that no one else did, an imaginary world of cider only she could see. "You can see the color in your head?" "It's the easiest way to explain it. A color pops into my head, and I know what it will taste like. When I blend the different raw ciders together, I know I have it right when it matches what I've imagined.

Isaac studied the huge, airy room and went to stand in front of a wall of watercolor apples- each one was set off by a colored background ranging from deep blue to fluorescent green to soft pink. He turned to ask Sanna about it, but she was still in the kitchen, pulling salt-crusted baked potatoes from the oven. Bass kneeled on a bar stool and stirred sliced apples with cinnamon and sugar. On the counter were the fixings for a baked potato bar, with cheese, bacon, broccoli, sour cream, and minced chives. "Are the apples above the fireplace meaningful?" Einars bent lower to talk to Bass, as they layered the apples into a dish, forcing Sanna to answer the question. "Those are all the apples we grow in our orchard." There were at least thirty. He hadn't even known there were that many varieties of apple in the world. "Did you paint them?" "Some of them. Most were done by much older relatives.

The stones had come from their orchard, unearthed when the first generation of Lunds began planting the orchard four generations ago. The stones varied in color and shape, from light gray limestone to rusty red granite, each highlighted by the golden light. Above the inset wooden mantel hung a huge collage of watercolor paintings, comprised of six-inch squares, each showcasing a different variety of apple grown in the orchard set against a distinguishing hue.

too many suspicions or deeply seated feelings are scattered amongst memories better suited to watercolor paintings abandoned during rainstorms.

For his 101st birthday, the nursing home where he now lives organized an exhibition of his art. The show features a delicate watercolor work he painted in art class when he was a mere boy of 13. He points to a piece of fruit in the painting, 'This apple here I had to bring back home from school. Mom wanted me to share it with my seven siblings. Can you imagine how poor we were?

To me, love looks like golden light flooding through curtains as the sun peeks over the horizon to paint the sky with watercolors. It looks like the distorted version of a city that you know like the back of your hand through a window blurred with rain. It looks like receipts and clothing tags marking pages and passages that remind you of your memories with them in one of your favourite books.

She met the rest of Jack's siblings- brainy mathematician and inventor Drake; war hero Cade; irrepressible twins Leo and Lawrence; and precociously artistic ten-year-old Esme, for whom she had once suggested the purchase of watercolor paper and paints. Lord Cade's new bride, Meg, was a welcoming presence, her face aglow with happiness from what she reported to have been a most satisfactory honeymoon sojourn. Grace took an immediate liking to her soon-to-be sister-in-law- bonding with her not only because of their similar ages but even more so because of their shared backgrounds. As commoners, they both knew what it was like being drawn into the glittering, whirlwind existence of the Byrons' aristocratic fold.

The title on the front of the sketchbook was written in bold cursive: 'Libby's Book of Butterflies.' One of the edges was folded, and she smoothed it with her hand, reverently, to honor the sister she'd never known. Then she stepped back under the light and flipped through the first pages. There were beautiful paintings of butterflies, their wings bright from the watercolors. Did her sister create this book or did someone make it for her? Mum had loved her gardens, but Heather had never known her to do any kind of artwork. She'd always been busy planting her flowers and working as a hairdresser and caring well for their family. Intrigued, Heather slowly turned the pages. The butterflies were unique in their brilliance, each one with a magical name. Golden Shimmer. Moonlit Fairy. Lavender Lace. Under the butterflies were short descriptions. Like they all had different personalities. Her favorite was the Autumn Dancer, colored a vibrant orange and red with speckles of teal. It reminded her of a leaf, clinging to its branch before the autumn winds blew it away.

I remember drawing and painting family members early on. I wanted to pour all I felt about them into my painting. I wanted them to feel honored, seen, and most of all to not be offended at how pronounced I made their nose. But instead of gushing warm feelings into a piece, it oozed with all the angst that I carried throughout the process.

The following morning, Wilhelmina awoke to a lone lily pad moaning after escaping from an exquisite Monet painting piece that was hosting some shades of watercolor chips that were a century and half-oldish that subbed as a dish for artsy gourmet-eating tadpoles that had both a yearning for the foggy past and longing for their froggy future.

viewer—have roles to play. When one does all the talking, it leaves the other with nothing to do. Part of the pleasure of a conversation is the mutual acknowledgement of common understanding. A well-chosen word refers to ideas and experiences that both participants appreciate, whereas describing everything implies that the other person has nothing to offer. Paintings that tell me too much always feel vaguely insulting, as if all that is wanted from me is to be impressed and say, “Wow!

Master Wang is a strange fellow. He’s full of riddles. I have no idea why I’m his only student. I like Meizhen though, we did some watercolor painting today. I miss you Dad.’ Zara reads her diary entry, and as she does a memory plays out in her mind, in the Wang family courtyard in Beijing… Meizhen demonstrates the technique, her slender but steady hands painting the tree before them, when she stops dead in her tracks gazing at two birds in the tree. “Look Zara, look at those two birds, see how one hops from branch to branch tasting the fruits. Tell me, what do you see?” “Birds, I see two birds.” “Good, but the bird on the highest branch, see how it simply observes the other bird flittering to and fro. It just watches.” Meizhen breathes in deeply and smiles, her eyes widen, “See that! The lower bird just stopped in its tracks to take a look at the higher bird watching; as if it had seen a mirror image of itself. Tell me, if one of those birds was dreaming it was the other, which one would it be?” “I think it’s the higher bird dreaming the life of the lower bird—” Zara pauses for thought— “Meizhen, does the Universe dream up the life of the higher bird?” Meizhen smiles at Zara, giving her an affectionate hug, “The Universe as we know it, is as we are—think of it like a never-ending painting.” “So, the Universe paints itself?” “I suppose it does, Zara. I suppose it does.

Come February, all of our off time was spent composing letters for the hundreds of valentines we sent out around the globe. Valentine cards had become a tradition of ours, born of the fact that we could never get ourselves organized in time to send out Christmas cards. With our ever-enlarging network of family, friends, and Foreign Service colleagues, we found that Paul’s hand-designed valentine cards—usually a woodcut or drawing, sometimes a photograph—were a nice way to keep in touch. But they could be labor-intensive. One year’s design was a faux stained-glass window, with five colors in it, each of which had to be hand-painted in watercolors—which took hours. For 1956, we decided to lighten up by doing something different: we posed ourselves for a self-timed valentine photo in the bathtub, wearing nothing but artfully placed soap bubbles.

To the villagers’ surprise, after Meghan was filmed with the children playing under the clean water bursting from the tap, she disappeared with Gabor Jurina. For hours Jurina photographed the perfectly coiffured actress hugging, squeezing and smiling with the village children. Each pose was followed by a change of clothing. ‘Meghan is a true humanitarian,’ Lara Dewar would say. Speaking of Meghan’s ‘authenticity’, Dewar praised her involvement with the children, letting them sit on her lap for the photographer.191 Once she returned to the village, Meghan was filmed admiring children painting images of their lives on paper supplied by the charity. The Watercolor Project, conceived by Matt Hassell’s staff, illustrated the value of the charity’s work to supply clean water. Strangely, Dewar would wrongly claim that Meghan was the ‘creator’ of the Project.192 Throughout the four-day trip Meghan was impeccably considerate to the accompanying team. She ensured there would be no repeat of her UN experience.193

She'd completed a small still life in oils, her first time experimenting with anything save watercolors, and she was rather proud of it. She'd plied the light just as she'd wanted, illuminating a scatter of ephemera, fraying silk and loose buttons and bits of worn glass. On a whim, she had painted one of her straw glamours, the wreath presiding over the gentle chaos.

Some women fight and others do not. Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O’Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it. On the surface her upbringing was conventional. She was a child on the Wisconsin prairie who played with China dolls and painted watercolors with cloudy skies because sunlight was too hard to paint and, with her brother and sisters, listened every night to her mother read stories of the Wild West, of Texas, of Kit Carson and Billy the Kid. She told adults that she wanted to be an artist and was embarrassed when they asked what kind of artist she wanted to be: she had no idea “what kind.” She had no idea what artists did.

She thought of the wax-white knook and shivered as she brushed against a pale pink tree branch. Was nothing the proper color here? Even the greens were more brilliant, more like paint than nature, the kinds of outlandish color she usually tried to temper in her own artwork. If she stayed, she thought absently, she could paint with the trees themselves, learn to sculpt petals and dew, hone even an animal into an ideal she created for it. She could craft beauty more rare and arresting than she ever could with watercolor and oil. She'd craved more of the world on the other side of the veil, wanted to taste the kind of success and belonging Alaine had, wanted recognition for her talents. Perhaps she could make that for herself here. Perrysburg, Pierce--- those had been poor illusions blurring what she really wanted. It would not be all pain, would it? Trading herself for Emily? All the places she had ever wanted to go, all the things she had ever wanted to see, all the art she had ever wanted to create--- didn't this place outstrip anything in her own world for beauty and discovery?

Don’t obsess over making eyebrows (or eyes) perfectly symmetrical: They’re sisters, not twins.

After a few moments' consideration I decided the seaside landscape project I did the previous summer after my trip up to Saugatuck, on the eastern coast of Lake Michigan, would look great in that spot. While landscapes weren't my usual thing, I thought I did a decent job with that series. I'd been in a rare mood for watercolors on that trip, and I thought the warm, sandy tones I'd used would go well with the color scheme of the room. As would the seashells and pieces of beach trash I'd glued to the canvas once the paint had dried.

Based on the parts of this... this scene that are not covered in refuse, and the drawings you have done for me, I know you are an artist with talent. Maybe I have old-fashioned views, but I simply don't understand why you would spend your time creating something like this." He shrugged his shoulders. "The sort of art I am used to seeing is more..." I raised an eyebrow. "More what?" He bit his lip, as though searching for the right words. "Pleasant to look at, I suppose." He shrugged again. "Scenes from nature. Little girls wearing filly white dresses and playing beside riverbanks. Bowls of fruit." "This piece shows a beach and a lake," I pointed out. "It's a scene from nature." "But it's covered in refuse." I nodded. "My art combines objects I find with images I paint. Sometimes what I find and incorporate is literal trash. But I also feel that my art is more than just trash. It's meaningful. These pieces aren't just flat, lifeless images on canvas. They say something." "Oh." He came even closer to the landscapes, kneeling so he could peer at them up close. "And what does your art... say?" His nose was just a few inches from an old McDonald's Quarter Pounder wrapper I'd laminated to the canvas so it looked like it was rising out of Lake Michigan. I'd meant for it to represent capitalism's crushing stranglehold on the natural world. Also, it just sort of looked cool. But I decided to give him a broader explanation. "I want to create something memorable with my art. Something lasting. I want to give people who see my works an experience that won't fade away. Something that will stay with them long after they see it." He frowned skeptically. "And you accomplish that by displaying ephemera others throw away?" I was about to counter by telling him that even the prettiest painting in the fanciest museum faded from memory once the patrons went home. That by using things other people throw away, I took the ephemeral and make it permanent in a way no pretty watercolor ever could.

At twenty-four she left all those opinions behind and went for the first time to live in Texas, where there were no trees to paint and no one to tell her how not to paint them. In Texas there was only the horizon she craved. In Texas she had her sister Claudia with her for a while, and in the late afternoons they would walk away from town and toward the horizon and watch the evening star come out. “That evening star fascinated me,” she wrote. “It was in some way very exciting to me. My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. Ten watercolors were made from that star.” In a way one’s interest is compelled as much by the sister Claudia with the gun as by the painter Georgia with the star, but only the painter left us this shining record. Ten watercolors were made from that star.

He came up to where Dasyel stood with the actress, near enough to see the mending in the sky armor and the starry dress, the black actors’ paint round both their eyes, the young and flawless skin of both, smooth as metal and brown from the road. Volk smiled at the actress and she took half a step in retreat. Volk looked harder at Dasyel; Dasyel did nothing, only looked back at him with his water-color eyes, unflinching, confident, open. And Volk felt that same passage of non-sexual yet demanding lust go through him as he had felt when he saw the maiden from Yevdora.

Shall I only teach them to curtsy the right way, how one may address a gentleman in passing, how to paint and embroider what others tell them is appropriate? Shall they only be good for one thing—decoration? Is that what you would have of Emma—whose dreams are bigger than the skies—or Julia—who is passionate and brave and bold? Shall they watercolor, my lord?

Stella looked out at the passing countryside now. It was like England as it is depicted on exported biscuit tins, a country of little valleys and beech copses, of gilded fields and mellow, misted hollows. Green hills rolled evenly, as if they'd been landscaped by Capability Brown, and oak-framed vistas presented themselves for her approval. Even the sheep here appeared to have been shampooed and set. Stella thought that if she'd grown up in Gloucestershire, she might be painting watercolor landscapes and infinitely contemplating variations of green.