Building Brilliant Watercolors

Treman is a highly accomplished watercolorist, working in a large-format, realistic style. Here, she concentrates on color theory and the unique ability of watercolor to achieve a transparent brilliance that lends work a heightened sense of reality. Unique to this volume is Treman's use of what she terms "disappearing purple." To avoid muddy colors, the bane of the medium, she paints in shadows as her first step, the opposite of the accepted method. She finds that shades of purple blend and disappear, leaving vivid, natural colors. (Old Masters, she contends, similarly used sepia as an underpainting in oils.) Limited mainly to floral still lifes, this should be added only after broader works on the same topic, like Rachel Rubin Wolf's Splash 4: The Splendor of Light (LJ 11/15/96).
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