ArtWise Drawings and Watercolor Paintings

This piece titled "Lost" is an original artwork by Heather Sundquist Hall, and is made from gouache on paper, mounted on birch cradled panel, sealed in UV protectant and wax varnish....

Artist: Ken Burton (English, 1946-) Title: "Wells Cathedral, Wells, UK" *Signed by Burton lower right Year: 1988 Medium: Original Watercolor on heavy wove paper Framing: Not framed, ...

Here for your consideration is a finely executed watercolor and gouache on archival paper rendering of the schooner Coral of Cowes by the well known Maine artist, David W. Clough. C...

Erotic Scene is a drawing realized by Ink and watercolor in 2020s. Ink and watercolor on paper. Hand-Signed. Good conditions. The artwork is realized through deft expressive stro...

Horse Racing on Tramore Beach in Southern Ireland with Mountains in the Distance, an Original Watercolour by Irish Artist, Sean Lorinyenko. Art measures 15 x 7 inches Frame measures...

In this contemporary portrait of a woman in watercolor and graphite painting on a digital pigment print, an intricate depiction on the woman's skin delicately details a NYC subway ca...

"Shadows - San Marcos" is a large watercolor by award-winning L.A. artist and architect Thomas W. Schaller. The watercolor painting depicts the bustling Piazza San Marco with the Basilica front and center. The tower is casting a shadow on the Basilica which further enhances its exquisite facade. The crowd's silhouettes can be seen in the puddles at their feet. For more works by Thomas Schaller...

"The End of Day" is a watercolor by award-winning L.A. artist and architect Thomas W. Schaller. The watercolor painting depicts a man in a red coat and his loyal dog standing at the edge of a dock and looking out across the lake at distant cottages. Two boats are tied to the dock and the man and his companion seem to be relaxing and enjoying the soothing sounds of the gentle waters and the comforting shade of the over-arching tree. For more works by Thomas Schaller...

Plum Branches and Flowers watercolor on wove paper, 1985 Signed and dated in pencil lower right corner From the artist's 1985 sketchbook Inspired by O'Sickey's love of Japanese and Chinese art and calligraphy. Provenance: Estate of the artist Condition: Excellent Image/Sheet size: 13 5/8 x 17 inches Joseph B. O’Sickey, Painter 1974 CLEVELAND ARTS PRIZE FOR VISUAL ARTS The title conferred on him by Plain Dealer art critic Steve Litt in a 1994 article, “the dean of painting in northeast Ohio,” must have pleased Joseph O'Sickey. It was more than 30 years since he had burst onto the local (and national) art scene. O’Sickey was already in his 40s in that spring of 1962 when he had his first one-man show at the Akron Art Museum and was signed by New York’s prestigious Seligmann Galleries, founded in 1888. In the decade and a half that followed, he would have seven one-man shows at Seligmann, which had showed the work of such trailblazing figures as Seurat, Vuilliard, Bonnard, Leger and Picasso, and appear in all of the group shows. O’Sickey took the Best Painting award in the 1962 May Show at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). He and would capture the same honor in back-to-back May Shows in 1964 and ’65, and again in 1967. The remarkable thing, noted the Plain Dealer’s Helen Borsick, was that he accomplished this sweep in a variety of painterly styles, even using that most hackneyed of subjects, flowers. “The subject doesn’t matter,” he told her, “what the artist brings to it is the important thing.” O’Sickey’s garden and landscape paintings were big and bold, eschewing delicate detail in favor of vitality and impact. The great art collector and CMA benefactor Katherine C. White, standing before one of O’Sickey’s vivid garden paintings, compared the sensation to “being pelted with flowers.” Though he might represent an entire blossom with one or two smudged brush strokes or a stem with a simple sweep of green, O’Sickey rejected the moniker of Impressionist—or Pointillist or Abstract painter or Expressionist. “My work,” he said, “is a direct response to the subject. I believe in fervor and poetic metaphor. I try to make each color and shape visible and identifiable within the context of surrounding colors and shapes. A yellow must hold its unique quality from any another yellow or surrounding color, and yet read as a lemon or an object, by inference. It does not require shading or modeling—the poetic evocation is part of the whole.” “The subject,” O’Sickey used to tell his students at Kent State University, where he taught painting from 1964 to 1989, “has to be seen as a whole and the painting has to be structured to be seen as a whole.” He liked to think of it as “a process of controlled rapture.” When, in the 1960s, fond childhood memories drew him to the zoo, he found himself responding to the caged animals in their lonely dignity (or indignity) with sharp-edged, almost silhouette-like forms that evoked Matisse’s paintings and cut-paper assemblages. One observer was left with the impression that the artist had “looked at these animals, past daylight and into dusk when they lose their details in shadow and become pure shapes, with eyes that are seeing the viewer rather than the other way around. This is a world of shape and essence,” wrote Helen Borsick. “All is simplification.” O’Sickey attributed his ability to capture his subjects with just a few strokes—in an almost iconographic way—to a rigorous exercise he had imposed upon himself over a period of several months. Limiting his tools to a large No. 6 bristle brush and black ink, he set himself the task of drawing his pet parakeet and the other small objects in its cage (cuttlebone, feeding dish, tinkling bell) hundreds of times. The exercise gave him “invaluable insights into painting. . . . Because of the crudity of the medium, every part of these drawings had to be an invention and every mark had to have its room and clarity.” Then he began adding one color at a time—“still with the same brush and striving for the same clarity”—and headed off to the zoo where “the world opened up to me. I learned how little it took to express the subject.” Born in Detroit at the close of the First World War, O’Sickey grew up in St. Stanislaus parish near East 65th and Fleet on Cleveland’s southeast side. (The apostrophe was inserted into the family’s proud Polish name by a clerk at Ellis Island.) An early interest in drawing and painting may have been kindled by the presence on the walls of Charles Dickens Elementary School, one of only three grade schools in the district with a special focus on the arts, of masterful watercolors by such Cleveland masters as Paul Travis, Frank N. Wilcox and Bill Coombes. As a youngster O’Sickey took drawing classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and he and his brother spent hours copying famous paintings; while a student at East Tech High School in the mid-’30s, he attended free evening classes in life drawing with Travis and Ralph Stoll at the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Institute, and Saturday classes at the Cleveland School (later the Cleveland Institute) of Art, where he earned his degree in 1940 under the tutelage of Travis, Stoll and such other legendary figures as Henry Keller, Carl Gaertner, William Eastman, Kenneth Bates...

Gouache on paper Ilia Balavadze is a Georgian artist born in 1968 who lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. From 1987 to 1993, he studied the painting at the Tbilisi State Academy of...

A paper lantern explodes out of the water, as if propelled by an inner, unknown force. This surreal landscape is done in exacting detail with watercolor and gouache down to the smal...

SECRET GARDEN 2 is a new watercolor on Fabriano paper by Fleur Thesmar. The artwork measures 22x30". It is custom framed with anti-UV and anti-glare glas...