Valley Mists, Wet-in-Wet Watercolour

Valley Mists, Wet-in-Wet Watercolour

Club Night 23.01.2024 - Catherine Beale

With a combination of punchy colours and wet-in-wet watermarks, Catherine Beale achieves a gutsy range of tone coupled with lashings of atmosphere in her landscape art. Catherine returned to Club Night to share how she captures light and luminosity through her new watercolour techniques. A professional artist, her work has been in many group and solo exhibitions and can be found in private and public collections worldwide. Catherine is a member of the Society of Women Artists.

The evening started with Catherine describing her path to becoming a professional artist. As a school girl she had a passion and talent for art but she was encouraged to opt for a more ‘academic’ business career. However, in the 1990’s, whilst living in Singapore, her love of painting reared again. Initially she created architectural paintings in oils, then moved on to portrait commissions in pencil, both proving very popular. After 9 years and a move back to the UK Catherine rediscovered the constantly changing, subtle light and atmosphere of the British landscape, which inspired her to specialise in watercolours. Each piece aims to capture images from nature, whilst melding with her own feelings, emotions and memories to create a sense of place.

Catherine demonstrated her ‘Gravity Painting‘ techniques in re-creating an atmospheric woodland scene which she had previously visited and painted.

The surface used was Daler Rowley cold press 300gsm paper attached to board. This prevented buckling of the wet paper. Alternatively a watercolour ground could be used.

Catherine used two palettes - one for cooler colours, one for warmer. Winsor & Newton Professional watercolours are her ‘go to’ watercolours plus Daniel Smith. Only occasionally does Catherine use masking for whites.

The Process began with a Pencil outline of design to give a structure and starting point. Wet on wet painting followed for the scenery back ground using a Pro Arte One Stroke Flat 1” brush. Lots of pigment was used. Catherine enjoyed running grainy opaque pigments into transparent colours and vice versa to form interest within almost amorphous shapes. The work was then allowed to dry whilst we took a break to chat over refreshments and take a closer look at Catherine’s work and display items.

The next stage was wet on dry (or nearly dry) – using a smaller flat brush. This was all about sculpting the painting by moving it around or removing pigment where too heavy or the colour didn’t work. This was done by lifting out or dabbing off. It was then time to move on to adding more finer detail eg. leaves and small branches with rigger or small brush, or continue to lift out and sculpt detail.

The painting gradually took shape, from what appeared initially to be quite a messy mix of paints to a beautiful piece, full of colour and atmosphere. Catherine explained that the shafts of sunlight running through dark tones exemplifies the main focus in her work - where the light meets the dark.

The finished piece

We had enjoyed an inspiring demonstration from a talented artist with several of us buying Catherine’s new book about her techniques.

Anyone interested in art purchases, work shops, publications, commissions etc. can find further details at:- www.catherinebeale.com