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Turning Toward Tourmaline (Jewel of Light
Series)
Watercolor
A fascination with gemstones, glass, color and light led to this series of watercolor paintings. I love to work in a series as it provides opportunities to explore a theme or concept, compositional challenges, color schemes, and different formats. In the Jewels of Light Series I use the names and colors of gemstones as my inspiration, and I manipulate light to create my compositions. Hand-blown glass ornaments, vases, bottles, and glasses are arranged with new color combinations and interesting negative spaces in mind. Painting glass in watercolor is all about light and its properties of transparency, reflections, shadows, reflected light, highlights, angles, and values. The time and complexity involved in nature's formation of a jewel is amazing. "Turning Toward Tourmaline" has multiple glazes of watercolor that appear as bronze-green, red-violet and yellow-gold with skillful attention given to the observed, exaggerated and imagined purity found in a gemstone.