My Favorite Painting!!

Glass Window by Winslow Homer, 1885

www.eleuthera.com/glasswindow.html

Photo showing the two sides from the road heading north

I decided to choose one of Homer's watercolor paintings. When I saw "A Wall, Nassau, 1898" in our textbook, it brought back a lot of memories when I used to live in Miami Beach and took several trips to the different islands in the Bahamas.
I looked up more of his watercolor paintings and this one caught my eye.

Homer had a fascination for the sea as many of his canvases showed. I can say the same thing for myself, I love the ocean and the beach life. This painting is from one of the Bahamas many islands called Eleuthera. This bridge linked the districts of Governor's Harbour and North Eleuthera and it is known as the "Glass Window". This spot is a fantastic sight where the deep-azure of the Atlantic Ocean meets the turquoise Caribbean Sea. Sailors going south in the waters between New Providence and Eleuthera named this area the Glass Window because they could see through the narrow cavity to the Atlantic on the other side.

Below is a Google Satellite Map which shows the Glass Window bridge from above; note the difference in color of the deep Atlantic, and the shallow, tranquil Caribbean sides www.eleuthera.com/glasswindow.html.

I think that this painting shows the unique strengths of the watercolor medium at its best. Homer used charcoal underdrawing, rapid and expressive brushwork, other watermarks, drybush textures, and colors mixed on the page. His technique was natural and fluid demonstrating his innate talent for a difficult medium" http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/artist14.html.

In this painting, Homer created "crisp" outlines with minimal details and strong value contrasts, This was his traditional watercolor technique, starting with a pencil drawing and then using a minimal pallete of colors such as "yellow ochre, burnt sienna, prussian blue, and ivory black". Additionally, he filled the picture with large wash areas that were blotted, scraped or accented with blossoms or other watermarks, and using drybrush in the foreground to reveal the paper's surface texture.

In this painting you can really appreciate the sparkling blue skies of the Caribbean and the light creates an invigorating effect on the pallete of colors. Homer liked to the presentation of landscapes, without human figures to create a relationship between nature and the viewer.

Ironically, Winslow Homer used to be an illustrator for New York periodicals such as the Harper's Weekly. He also worked as a war correspondent (illustrator) with the Union Army, producing Civil War themes throughout the 1860's and 1870's. As an oil painter, he didn't have a lot of success and some of the complaints about his works were that they were "dull and lack of finish". He started to paint in watercolors at the age of 37, and he became "critically successful' but his watercolor showings were not very profitable. He joined the American Society of Painters in Water Colors, probably to free himself from deadlines and critical reviews (http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/artist14.html).