Watercolors Brought To Life

Remember that time J.M.W. Turner grew a thumbnail long enough to be almost grotesque, to perforate the paper and lift the paint into an effect of rushing iridescence? Or the time he used a pumice stone to create a sandy effect to make the the light glisten in the rainbow?

Scott Wilcox, deputy director for collections at the Yale Center for British Art (YBCA), does. At a recent alk, he revealed fascinating tidbits about the great English painter‘s watercolor technique in “Observations on the Rise and Progress of Painting in Water Colours,” a talk that riveted 50 listeners on the nicely air-conditioned fourth floor of the Yale University Art Gallery.

If you were intrigued by Mike Leigh’s recent biopic Mr. Turner, which played, along with a public interview with Mike Leigh, during the recent International Festival of Arts & Ideas, these small works will take you directly back into that visual genius’s world.

For Wilcox, the matter was both personal and professional. He was an aspiring water-colorist, he confessed, until he encountered the daunting work of Turner, Thomas Girtin and the other earlier practitioners of watercolor. In the late 18th and early 19th century, it was just an emerging new medium, posing a challenge to oil painting. In all his travels as a curator and administrator in the world of art history ​“my great love is the British watercolors in the late 18th and early 19th century,” he said.

During Turner’s life, transparent water colors had long been available for decades in little cakes and were, unlike the requirements for painting in oils, easily transportable. So the origins of watercolors were in the making of documentary, draftsman-like drawings of pretty locales that specialized collectors kept in albums and never made their way onto walls. It was the genius of Turner and his compatriots, Wilcox explained, that transformed the medium ​“from a colored-in drawing to a complex painting” of landscape.

Those early works include ​“St. Augustine’s Gate” by Turner and” Jedburgh Abbey” by Thomas Girtin, a contemporary of Turner’s who died young.

Within a short time, Turner was leading the way with that thumb of his, the use of dramatic light, and other elements with the effect that the documentary watercolor was now competing with oil paintings, or finding ways to do what oils could not.

In ​“Mer de Glace” (pictured), for instance, Wilcox pointed out the big storm, a snake in the foreground, the increase in size and the increase in drama.

Turner had no trouble hanging his watercolors along with his oils in the exhibitions of the Royal Academy, which the artist helped to found.

But as the years went on, other watercolorists weren’t as lucky and they formed the Society of Painters in Water Colours, in 1804.

Even though Turner never joined, his work like ​“Mer de Glace,” with its challenging effects and innovative technique became the cat’s meow, the standard by which those who came after him measured their success in watercolor.

“He’s laying down color, but also manipulating the pigment and the paper. He’s put down some wax [here], scrapes in the paper [there], upbraided the paper, laid down more paint for wide ranging effects,” Wilcox said as he invited his listeners to come up close to the works and see for themselves.

That’s exactly what Renate Recknagle and Grace McEnaney did.

Recknagle (pictured), a Wooster Square resident, was there because her favorite artist is Turner. While she knew his paintings, she did not know either that watercolors dated as far back as they do or that they had emerged out of a documentary draftsmanship tradition.

For McEnaney, the revelations were not quite as academic. She’s from Newton and a water color painter herself, she said. As she looked closely at ​“Upper Falls of the Reichenbach: Rainbow,” she pointed out precisely where in the painterly strokes of color making up the rushing water that Turner may have inserted that thumb.

“Just amazing, awesome, fabulous,” she declared.

I asked Wilcox what initially and after all the years still draws him to watercolors. He thought for a moment and said, ​“The luminosity. I’m bowled over by the technique. I’m overwhelmed by this, astounded at the effects these artists can get with this simple medium.”

The Turner watercolors and oil paintings that fill the fourth floor of the Yale University Art Gallery are there on long-term loan and display from the YCBA as part of the ​“The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art, 1760 to 1860.” That’s because YCBA is closed for renovations through the end of the year. ​“The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art, 1760 to 1860” closes Sunday.