Contemporary Watercolour On The Go, Marion Rivolier – Book Review

 

 

It’s a 160 page paperback, one of those in a square looking format.  I think I prefer the usual rectangular format, although I don’t mind the square shaped ones if they come in hardback.  This one has an introduction and 21 enticing sounding chapters.  Books with this many chapters tend to be quite heavy on content: if I’m making notes and find one thing worth writing down in each chapter, that already feels like a lot of notes.

 

But what happens in those chapters?  Well, Marion sets the readers a number of exercises, shows her attempts at the exercises and another painting using some of the lessons from the exercise.  But the problem is that she doesn’t give us any tips about how to complete the exercises.  If we’re lucky, we get to hear Marion’s conclusion from doing them.  So maybe we get a three part exercise which tells us to paint the scene three times: once in cool colours, once in warm and once using both.  And we get a conclusion; at the end telling us see, when you have both warm and cool the contrast makes for a better painting.  And that’s it.  Sometimes there aren’t even any lessons and the exercise seems a bit pointless.  Paint the background on its own, then the foreground in its own, then both together.  Why, Marion, why?  The contrast between this and Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, is huge: that was a book where the author built up to exercises, giving us tips in advance and told us why they were important.  This one has exercises here, just because.

 

So this book is just reduced to one where I just look at the pictures and decide whether to be inspired by them, whether to copy any of the author’s techniques.  But is there anything worth copying?  Well the idea of putting paint down without doing a drawing first is interesting (not that we’re given any tips on how to do this) and it’s interesting how much empty space she leaves on the page but, to be honest, after a while ai just get sick of her style.  It’s not a pleasure the eyes (not that that’s why she does these sketches – she’s in interested in documenting her day) and there’s too little value contrast in her paintings.  I’m more likely to look for inspiration from a variety of styles in The Art Of Urban Sketching than I am to flick through this one.

 

So I do regret buying this one.  Which means, I’m afraid, that it only gets one palette.

 

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