Bean Fields
Bean fields, Paris Hill, NY. watercolor, approx 11 x 7 in., 9/18/2010. (click for larger view)
Maybe it was the time of year that reminded me, but this simple little watercolor was what I felt like painting last weekend. I grew up not far from here, and this sort of agricultural, rolling landscape of hills and fields is what really feels like "home." The historic little village of Paris Hill is to the left of this view; the stone wall borders an old graveyard and there's a lovely church at the crossroads; this land sits on a high point in the hills, below Utica and the Mohawk valley, and is beautiful and pastoral in every direction and in every season, though it's notorious for blowing and drifting snow in the winter! I can remember coming home from many high school wrestling matches against the Utica-area schools and wondering if we'd make it past Paris Hill.
Unfortunately the NYS department of transportation has put a highway right through these fields, so it doesn't look like this any longer. I love the place, though, and did an oil painting of these fields from a slightly different angle a long time ago.
This was also my first successful foray back into this sort of watercolor. It's less fluid and expressive than where I intend to go, but I was quite happy – as any watercolorist is – to have a painting end up in the "keeper" drawer instead of in pieces in the wastebasket (which a couple of other attempts did.) The agony and ecstasy of painting is definitely contained in this medium, where happy "accidents" often make the painting, and unhappy mistakes or decisions usually can't be corrected. Here, for instance, I didn't intend the white patches where my brush skipped along the smooth green bean field at center right, but they help the picture tremendously. On the other hand, the green of the fields should continue at the end of the stone wall and touch the trees, but there's no way to fix that once the paint is dry. Every watercolor contains a myriad of such things, unless you're John Singer Sargent or Winslow Homer – but I bet even they had their share of disasters!
This one is done on a sample sheet of handmade watercolor paper from La Papeterie St-Armand, an artisan papermaking mill along the Lachine Canal in Montreal, which I visited some months ago. This is a cold press sheet with plenty of texture, and I liked working on it very much.
Really beautiful. I love your description of the area just as much as the picture itself.
Beautiful, Beth.
Beautiful. I think you must have to be a confident painter, as well as open to fortuitous mistakes, to be able to paint well in watercolors. And I imagine in a calm, open and meditative state of mind.
Thank you, Kim, Dick, Leslee.
You’re right, Leslee. The best watercolors have a lot of spontaneity backed up by confidence, technique, experience. Which only comes from painting and painting, I guess! And you’re right about the meditative and open quality. It’s like the Zen disciplines, requiring a great deal of practice so that when the time comes you can let go. I find if I get interrupted in the middle of a painting that’s going well, it’s very hard to regain the same state of mind. Watercolor goes further for me in that direction than most of the other media. I love it for the way it opens up this different mental and creative space, where you sort of can’t make conscious decisions requiring a lot of time, but it’s also the most frustrating and most demanding because your shortcomings are right there in front of you!