HWS Members Show 2020

Dawn Yoshimura, Mao Ka Ua (The Rain Has Cleared) 14" x 21"
Mao ka ua. The rain has cleared. Transparent watercolor. Dawn Yoshimura 2020.

The Hawai’i Watercolor Society Members Juried show opened on March 2020 and was supposed to be held at the space Arts at Marks Garage. Due to COVD19 it was held online instead and can be viewed online at the HWS website. It will remain online until the next shows come up, The Little Picture show which for now, is planned to be hung at Marks and the upcoming Open Juried Show Transparency in Translation a collaboration between the Glass Fusion Collective and HWS sponsored by the Honolulu Museum of Art.

This show is a representation of the various styles and subjects the membership paint in watermedia. I have two pieces selected in the show, one is from my Mauna Kea series I wrote about last year and the other is a piece more representative of my COVD painting period that I wrote about in Filling the Well. Both pieces are illustrations of the paintings I make when I rely on emotion and memory as my references rather than en plein air.

I am asked if I use photographs as reference for paintings. I do, for painting demos in instruction, and I will take photos while I am travelling but I would say I do not use photographs as a reference material any more than I use my sketches and handwritten notes as a memory device. I don’t rely on either source but I use them to jog my memory so I can tap into my experience and story I tell myself about every piece I create.

To observers, my color sketches, often the size of a business card seem very rough and hard to connect to a finished piece. But to me, I see the color that captured my eye in the far horizon, the direction of the wind, the time of day. For the Ko’olau piece, I was painting a sense memory but also at the same time playfully exploring texture. I used shreds of different paper with differing absorbency, rice grains, dental swabs to create textures to amuse myself and describe what I remembered the last time I gazed at my beloved mountains.