Watercolor Paintings & Silverpoint Drawings by Stephen Scott Young

Iron and Brick, by Stephen Scott Young, 2009, drybrush watercolor, 19 ¼ x 22 ½. Courtesy Adelson Galleries, New York, New York.

Lonely Canal in Venice, by Stephen Scott Young, 2009, silverpoint on coated paper, 14" x 10 1/2". Courtesy Adelson Galleries, New York, New York.


Narrow Canal, Venice, by Stephen Scott Young, 2009, silverpoint on tinted, coated paper, 9" x 7 1/4". Coutesy Adelson Galleries, New York, New York.

Stephen Scott Young is one of the most successful, talented, and humble artists I know; and I was delighted to write about his recent work for the spring, 2010 issue of Watercolor magazine. Scott's watercolors are currently on view at Warren Adelson Galleries in New York (www.adelsongalleries.com) priced at $250,000; and one of his signature paintings of a young, black, Bahamian girl sold at Sotheby's in 2007 for $348,000. Scott went though a number of professional and personal changes last year, and the most positive development was that he made two trips to Venice to create graphite drawings, watercolor paintings, and 17 silverpoint drawings.

Silverpoint has been used by artists for centuries and involves drawing on a prepared surface with a strand of sterling silver held in a mechanical pencil or hollow piece of wood. At first the thin lines are faint and shimmering, but in time the silver tarnished to become a warm gray. Because the silver will only register on a surface covered with traditional gesso, casein, or gouache, it is impossible to erase the metallic lines. Even trying to cover up stray lines winds up making the prepared surface looked patched. Most of Scott's silverpoint drawings were done on sheets of Fabriano Uno paper coated with traditional gesso (a warm mixture of powdered whiting and rabbit-skin glue).

Scott spent hundreds of hours developing the small drawings (no larger than 14" x 10") by laying down parallel lines in one direction (slightly off vertical), and then in another direction so as to create diamond or triangular shapes where the hatched lines crossed. In some places he also added stippled dots and horizontal lines to create a rich dark gray. Silverpoint does not allow for the kinds of deep blacks one can achieve with graphite or charcoal.

Scott did dozens of graphite drawings and used those as the basis of watercolors once he returned to his Florida studio. One of the paintings shows a model posing in a gondola along one of the narrow canals, and another (shown here) offers an interpretation of one of the doorways along the canal. His palette was limited to Winsor red, Winsor yellow, French ultramarine blue, and Shiva casein white. That differs from the palette he uses to paint the black citizens of the Bahamian island of Eleuthera (where he maintains one of three studios). The black figures are painted with French ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, brown madder, and Shiva casein white.

Scott will be teaching and demonstrating during American Artist's Weekend With the Masters conference taking place from September 23-26, 2010 at the Laguna Cliffs Resort & Spa in Dana Point, California (www.weekendwiththemasters.com).

Paint Landscapes From Sketches, Memory & Photos

9" x 12" oil sketch done on location near Ste. Stai church in Venice, Italy

Photograph of the location I painted.

The preliminary sketch done with diluted transparent oxide red oil paint on a 20" x 20" canvas.



The initial block-in of the local colors


The finished painting done from the plein air sketch, the photograph, and my memory.

Ever since my trip to Venice in May, 2009, I have been looking at paintings of the city by 19th century artists like Sargent and Whistler, as well as contemporary artists like Steve Rogers (http://www.watercolorsbyrogers.com/) and Len Mizerek (http://www.leonardmizerek.com/). I've become more aware of how those artists exaggerated the color relationships, simplified the complicated spaces, and composed the shapes and values. I decided to respond to that new awareness by painting a studio picture using the oil sketch I did on location, a photograph I took at the same time, and my imagination. I did the oil sketch near Ste. Stai, one of the many Venetian churches that Sargent painted.

In order to emphasize the abstract relationship of shapes, I changed the format of my painting from the horizontal shape of the plein air sketch to a square, increased the contrast between the cool and warm colors, heightened the bright colors, muted the dark- and middle-value colors, and used a palette knife to apply thick layers of paint that would emulate the textures of the ancient walls. Using the palette knife really transformed the painting and I'm sure I will use that technique again in other paintings. My friend Urania Christy Tarbet (http://www.uraniachristytarbet.com/) is sending me a set of palette knives she is now marketing because I told her how much I liked the effects one can get.

Painting Venice

What better place to begin talking about painting than Venice, Italy. It's a location that has interested artists for centuries, and there are probably more drawings, prints, and paintings of the floating city than almost any other place. During the 19th century, James A.M.Whistler and Thomas Moran may have sold more prints and paintings of Venice than the other subjects for which they are well known.

One of most popular buildings to paint in Venice is the Ca D'Oro which happened to be directly across from the hotel where I was staying in early June, 2009. A good friend, Peter Carey, took me there for my first visit, and he napped in the afternoons while I wandered through the alleys and along the Grand Canal with my pochade box, 9" x 12" panels, and oil paints.

A good friend, Sondra Freckelton, observed that I always set challenges for myself when I paint, and in Venice the challenge was to separate the drawing process from the application of local colors. That is, instead of following my usual procedure of blocking in large shapes of color and gradually breaking those down into smaller details, I decided the more appropriate method would be to draw the complicated architectural structures with a warm neutral color (red iron oxide, titanium white, and black) thinned with Galkyd fast-drying medium and then brush the colors over the drawing. That allowed me to resolve the design of the buildings before dealing with the actual colors in the scene.

Since that painting trip, I have been trying to take advantage of the power that neutrals have in bringing emphasis to the colors in a painting. That is, mixing complementary colors (red with green, purple with orange, etc.) or adding blacks and grays to color mixtures to lower the intensity (chroma) while maintaining the relative value. The benefit of this is that when I want to bring attention to an area of strong color, I "neutralize" the areas around that color. It goes back to the idea that when you want to make one thing important, you have to reduce the importance of everything around it.

Portrait painter understand this idea and will often refuse to "correct" a painting in front of a client. When the client asks for the cheeks to be more pronounced, for example, the painter knows to darken the area below the cheek bone. If the client actually saw that happening, he or she would think the artist was correcting the wrong thing. That's why I darked the shapes around the columns of the Ca D'Oro so the pink-white walls would appear brighter.

This is only a rough sketch and I intend to create a larger, more finished painting using my oil sketch and photographs to come up with something that captures the experience of Venice more completely. That should keep me busy through the cold winter months.