Fisherman III by Paula Visnoski in Middletown, Rhode Island.
Paula recently submitted her work to the gallery and I immediately fell in love with this piece from her watercolor archive. It is amazing. You can purchase a print from this site.
So often we see vibrant colors washed out to bring life to portraiture in watercolors. (Like this, this, and this.) However, this piece doesn’t follow that trend. It is vibrant because it is. The yellow of the jacket, the blue of the subject’s eyes, the white beard… all fit exactly how I would picture this gentleman smoking his pipe in the back of a coastline pub.
It is tough to tell the technique used for the smoke – whether it was a wet technique or a lift technique or something completely different – but I love it. What a great idea.