Watercolor is such a difficult medium to master that we tend to credit its all-too-frequent elevation of the most mundane, even banal, subject matter.
You might find yourself reflecting on this if you take a stroll through the Nevada Watercolor Society's spring show, through May 24 at Paseo Verde Library. Everything here is competently executed, and nearly everything has some spark or flair in the handling of the medium, as you might expect from a show presumably presenting a group's best work. But so few paintings prove to be imaginative. Here you have the expected lineup of usual suspects: flowers, boats, nice houses. All very pleasant, all quite unremarkable.
A few efforts, however, redeem the affair. The Best of Show, "One On—One Off" by Dottie Burton, is an example. Using Fauvist tones, Burton depicts an off-center, frame-filling seated figure, its crossed legs bulky and blue, torso and head relatively small. It's a wonder of compositional balance and tonal harmonies that might remind you of a Bonnard.
Susan Sargeant's "Aussie Sheep Man" stands out, too. It's a highly assured and strikingly sensitive portrait of a weathered working man whose ruddy complexion illumines an otherwise shadowed composition. His grimy fingers reach to scratch his grizzled cheek in an unguarded, honest moment. That it reads like a pastel only confirms Sargeant's skill with the brush.
"Swallowtails" by Sharon Hildebrand won second place with its inventive evocation of a swarm of butterflies, aglow like fireflies in an inky night sky. "Tonga" is a fairly standard landscape, viewing the curl of a tropical beach front, but its saving grace is the deceptively simple, active brushwork of the painter, Barrie Cooke Folsom.
As it happens, Folsom's work fills the gallery through May 8 at the Winchester Community Center. These mostly large-scale paintings are even more lively and fluid; so lively, in fact, that at first glance they might seem like a child's work peeled from an exceptionally large refrigerator. Bold strokes and dashes of dense, undiluted colors shape trees and mountains. But these are not childish, nor even childlike, exercises. Folsom reprises the insistent brushwork of Van Gogh, only in watercolor.
The bulk of the show comprises views at Red Rock Canyon—it would seem of the same jagged prominence, seen at different angles, distances and times. Folsom uses lines of blue to trace some contours, and varieties of red, orange and yellow, in cheese-curl twists and loops, to shape volumes. Sequences of short, horizontal dashes imply strata of stone.
But what's really remarkable in these paintings is the sky. With thin washes and patches of bleeding blue, Folsom deftly sets time and mood. Tiny, white, crystalline bursts animate the sky in "Red Rock IV." The sky of "Red Rock IX" ranges from india to aqua, with edges feathered to imply the harshness, the omnipresence, of desert sunlight.
You might wonder, if you peruse both shows, what's so wrong with being "merely" technically adept? If a painter—presumably engaging in the practice seriously but "on the side," as a hobby—wants to depict flowers or houses, who's harmed? No one, of course. And you're welcome to admire just treatments of ordinary subjects. But if a painter undertakes to master watercolor, why not seek to amaze, and not merely please?