"Water-colours shall be painted with much desire and plenty of water". This is my credo.
I've been studying watercolour technique a couple of years for an artist, Pentti Johannes Sutelainen, who is born in Sweden by Finnish parents.
Pentti is a very good teacher. His strength is in colour-technique and in composition.
As you may have noticed I've tried to invite a Guest of the Month. As guests I wanted to introduce to you some of my fellow "pupils" and other very good friends. Unfortunately it is to difficult to administrate. So I'll try other forms as well.
For administrative reasons (silly!) we in my course moved e few years ago to an other place and changed teacher. Her name is Eleanore Morrison and she is Scottish-born, so my education seems to be very international! Eleanore was very inspiring, but the circumstances changed. So we went back to Pentti.
I've also attended a course, conducted by the young Russian-born artist Maria Ginzburg.
It was very rewarding and I'll by and by tell you about my experiences.
The lectures mostly dealt with landscape painting and my greatest profit was to learn how to paint with wet colours on a wet paper. This technique produced very beautiful effects when painting reflections from trees in the water.
I have made a small exhibition (rev 1997) with some pictures from course.
We learned a lot about technical matters. Amongst many other things Maria introduced Russian pigments, called St Petersburg.
I found out that these pigments behaved otherwise than the ones I'm used to (from Winsor & Newton), probably because they use honey as the vehicle medium instead of Gum Arabic.
I've made some remarks about colours and I intend to extend them by and by. Click HERE if you are interested.
I've also made some notes about different water colour papers but for the moment it is not completely translated yet. I'll do that as soon as possible. Kindly observe that the experiences are solely my own and I'm only a dilettante.
I have decided to have a small exhibition mostly, but not entirely, with my own works.
I also keep the Kalevala-pictures for a while. The suite is now completed.
Last year we had to refrain from Pentti, but from autumn 2001 we will reunite.