Watercolor exhibition at the GCMA

Masterclass: Watermedia from the Greenville Collection is now open at the Greenville County Museum of Art. A category of painting mediums that are water soluble, watermedia includes watercolor, gouache, ink, acrylic, casein, and tempera. This exhibition surveys examples by American artists working over almost a century—from such early Modernists as Georgia O’Keeffe and Charles Burchfield to contemporary South Carolina Realists Mary Whyte and Margaret Peery—employing a wide range of techniques to realize traditional subjects as well as non-objective abstraction. Featuring twenty-five works, the exhibition includes works by internationally renowned painters Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Hart Benton as well as work by local painters Carrie Brown and Jeanet Dreskin.

Two mid-twentieth century masters demonstrate the full potential of watermedia. Andrew Wyeth rendered an extraordinary universe of objects in drybrush technique. He was equally adept at capturing the fluidity of fire and smoke as well as humid atmospheric conditions in wet-in-wet washes. Hans Hofmann, by contrast, distilled the essential thesis of Abstract Expressionism in his intuitive explosion of pure liquid exuberance: the medium is the message.

In addition to South Carolina painters Whyte and Peery, the exhibition includes works by Southern regional painters Margaret Moffett Law, Anna Heyward Taylor, Will Henry Stevens, Hubert Shuptrine, and Stephen Scott Young.

The exhibition is on view through September 8, 2019.

The Greenville County Museum of Art is located in the center of downtown Greenville’s cultural campus, Heritage Green, at 420 College Street. The GCMA is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 am until 5 pm and on Sundays from 1 pm until 5 pm. Admission is free.