Ocean and Rocks
<p>In 1917 Marin painted some of the most abstract watercolors of his career, influenced in part by an exhibition that year of Georgia O’Keeffe’s watercolors of simplified natural forms. In this and related works, the artist developed a nontraditional technique: he manipulated charcoal with a rag, which he rubbed and wiped through a semidry charcoal wash. Painting a mixture of powdered charcoal and dilute black watercolor over pale washes, he wiped horizontal and circular marks to suggest rock formations. The charcoal particles in the wash clumped as the wash dried, leaving a gritty pattern as they settled into the valleys of the textured paper. Marin’s choice of a stepped frame enhances the dynamism of water washing across rocks.</p>
Catalogue
- Year
- 1917
- Dimensions
- 42 × 49.5 cm (16 9/16 × 19 1/2 in.)
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Artist
- John Marin
Artist
Painting
John Marin was an American modernist painter and printmaker known for his dynamic watercolors and etchings of coastal landscapes, particularly Maine. Working primarily in watercolor from the 1910s onward, he developed a fractured, energetic visual language that synthesized Cubist fragmentation with direct observation of nature. His gestural brushwork and bold use of paper's white ground anticipated Abstract Expressionism while maintaining a strong sense of place and atmospheric condition. Marin spent decades based in Maine, where the rocky coastlines and maritime environment became the primary subject of his mature work.
Full artist profile →More
More by John Marin
Approaching Fog
1952 · Watercolor with blotting, wiping and traces of scraping, and with brush and black ink, graphite, fabricated charcoal, and touches of opaque watercolor on medium-weight, rough-textured, off-white wove paper (four edges trimmed)
Movement: Boats and Objects, Blue Gray Sea
1947 · Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Bridge - on the Bridge, No. 2
1944 · Etching
Cape Split, Maine
1941 · Watercolor with touches of blotting, and with graphite and black colored pencil, on lightweight (estimated), slightly textured, ivory wove paper (top, left and right edges trimmed), laid down on artists’ board faced with ivory wove paper, in original frame
Circus Elephants
1941 · Watercolor with scraping and wiping, and with opaque watercolor, graphite and black crayon, on medium-weight, slightly textured, cream laid paper
Movement: Sky and Grey Sea
1941 · Watercolor, charcoal, and pencil on paper
Record
Verified by WattsOS- Artist
- John Marin
- Year
- 1917
- Dimensions
- 42 × 49.5 cm (16 9/16 × 19 1/2 in.)
- Watts ID
- WW-1917-131276
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified