Artist’s StatementWhile I especially like to paint en plein air, much of my work is done in the studio from photographs I have taken on location. Call it informed imagination, but my experience out of doors allows me to visualize the play of light throughout a painting that I’m doing in the studio.
To me, it’s all about light. Something that particularly excites me about transparent watercolors is the way in which light is expressed. In contrast to other media, the effects of light are not painted. They are revealed. That is to say, in transparent watercolors available light reflecting off the artist’s painting surface is what creates the sense of luminosity. The artist leaves the white of the background material, or tints it in various ways, providing value contrasts, setting up color relationships, and letting colors blend. Taken together, these brush strokes reveal the moment, character, and effect of light.
My subject matter, for the most part, comes from coastal Maine and the foothills of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts—two of my favorite places.
Robert Grant is a signature member of the Garden State Watercolor Society in New Jersey and the New England Watercolor Society. He has also had works juried into shows of both the New Jersey and the North East Watercolor Societies. As he has come in recent years increasingly to work in miniatures, his work has been shown in international juried shows of both the Miniature Art Society of Florida and the Miniature Painters, Sculptors, and Gravers Society of Washington, D.C.
Bob, as he is known by friends, began painting watercolors a few years before he retired in 1997 from a forty-year career as an ordained minister in The United Methodist Church. His wife Nancy and he summer in Boothbay, Maine and live in the off-season in Haydenville, Massachusetts.
© Robert E. Grant, 2008