Movement No 23–The Sea and Pertaining Thereto
1927
John Marin American, 1870-1953
United States
Marin employed colored pencil differently in this sheet than he had in previous works, adding watercolor pigment subtly and tentatively and leaving thin gray lines that he neither reinforced nor repeated. While he used underdrawing to outline solid objects, he drew over the washes in order to indicate intangible pictorial elements such as the direction of the waves; the fine lines add touches of precision to the fluid, wet-into-wet paint effects that predominate.
Watercolor with blotting, wiping, and touches of scraping, and with black and brown colored pencils, on moderately thick (estimated), moderately textured, ivory wove paper (top, right and lower edges trimmed), hinged to paper prepared with a black wash, with a decorative paperboard collar gilt with silver leaf, laid down on wood-pulp board faced with cream wove paper, in original frame