Blue Sea (recto); Sheet of Sketches (verso)
<p>In this watercolor from the summer of 1923, Marin looked down over steep ledges studded with rock pine toward the harbor and islands below. He painted with overlapping transparent washes, employing little to no reworking, rewetting, or blotting. The artist used clear water, floating it into adjacent washes along the perimeter to achieve a hazy frame. Strikingly, he superimposed a structure of emphatic horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines painted with a wide brush and blue watercolor. The effect is fencelike, suggesting that Marin might have been painting on a railed porch or the top level of a dock leading down to the water.</p>
Catalogue
- Year
- 1923
- Dimensions
- 35.4 × 43.7 cm (13 15/16 × 17 1/4 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
- 1923
- Dimensions
- 35.4 × 43.7 cm (13 15/16 × 17 1/4 in.)
- Watts ID
- WW-1923-131282
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified