Splash is all about the editorial eye and Rachel Rubin Wolf is very good at collecting works that, while unconnected in themselves, play off each other and develop a theme. This isn’t a painting manual as such, but it shows you what can be – and is being – achieved with watercolour.
There’s a huge variety of stuff here, from the highly realistic to the totally abstract. I turned to the introduction in the hope of a definition of the alternative approach, but Rachel and the artists she quotes are coy on the subject. I think that the idea is that these people are working in ways that are less familiar to them. As a concept, it’s fine, but it does rather assume that we know the rest of their work. In the US, this might be the case, but here, I don’t think the idea works, these not being artists we are familiar with. Not that it really matters. There’s some super work here and the book is worth much more than a passing look.
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