(Watercolor by Elizabeth Haberman)
The term ‘watercolor painting’ indicates that one might expect to see a bit of color in the painting! And most of my paintings over the past 16 years have been quite colorful; but when I was perusing a series of my photographs of local and somewhat colorful wildlife, I thought, “why not paint them monochromatically?” The first experimental attempt was a painting of a clustered trio of birds titled, Three’s Company. I found that I enjoyed the challenge of expressing the details of the animals in “black and white,” and onward I went.
Following retirement and a move from Los Angeles to Central Oregon, the first painting instruction I received was from renowned Sunriver and Tumalo Art Gallery watercolorist, Helen Brown. She frowned on anyone who used black paint from a tube and insisted that I create my own black paint by combining two colors typically found on a painter’s palette. The black paint recipe I painted with that first year of watercolor is the same one I use today, a combination of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna, leaving some grays a bit bluer and others more taupe depending on the amount of each of the two ingredients. I enjoyed the (almost) colorless experiment so much that I painted the series of five paintings shown here.
I have studied with aforementioned Helen Brown, Judith Morris, Myrna Wacknov and David Lobenberg. I’m currently director of the Nancy McGrath Green Gallery in Sunriver.
I think of painting as therapy: a quiet place I can go by myself to express something I’m feeling or to describe a scene from the space around me. My subjects are serious and whimsical, colorful and dark, and sometimes even “black and white.”
Elizabeth (Liz) Haberman is member of the High Desert Art League and the Watercolor Society of Oregon where she won Best of Show in 2020 and an Award of Distinction in 2022 and 2023.