Pochoir! and my new crush on gouache

I just spent a blissful week learning a new-to-me printmaking and painting technique online. It was a fully immersive experience - the Zoom format didn’t inhibit anything. I know this because I found myself dreaming in the new medium, and that only happens to me when I can set aside all distraction and completely engage with materials and imagery.

The medium is gouache paint and the process is pochoir - a lovely French word for stencil. The class was offered through Anderson Ranch Arts Center and taught by pochoir master Liz Ferrill whom I had met last summer at the Ranch when she was a guest artist in a printmaking workshop with another master, Jean Gumpper.

I’m so grateful to the Ranch for the full tuition scholarship that enabled me to devote a week to studying with Liz and wonderful artists from all over the country. Liz is an incredible teacher - clear, organized, thorough, patient and inspiring. It was a safe bet that I’d love and relish this luxurious week of learning, but for this class there was actually a big hurtle for me to overcome -my longtime fear of/resistance to gouache.

When Carson Ellis and Susan Cooper chatted onstage in an amazing artist talk about author/illustrator collaboration at the Carle last year, Carson described gouache as “like watercolor except better”. I tried and failed to get on board with that notion.

I really love watercolor, for some of the same reasons I love oil paint. These are mediums that move beautifully with a brush, allowing you to travel big distances with pigment and create translucent layers. I was so fortunate to encounter watercolor when I was seven or eight years old in Saturday art classes with Penny Ross and then to study painting in watercolor and in oils for years with Ophrah Shemesh in NYC.

While everything that happens should happen for a reason in working with these mediums, the intentional mark-making in watercolor and in oils still leaves an enormous range of possibility for the beautiful-accidental. Not so much with gouache, for me. I bought my first gouache paints- 18 Holbein colors! - a couple years ago and tried to work with them like watercolor, but found the paint didn’t move at all. If I used it like watercolor, I really just missed watercolor. Nothing about that watery gouache worked well for me, it just seemed to stop short and leave a kind of dead, flat, matte, even chalky mark. Worse, if I tried to use gouache as an opaque medium (which it is more what it’s designed for) I disliked it even more. That is, until this week, when I dug out that gouache set and became a student of pochoir.  I learned to handle the paint super-dry, to pounce with a stencil brush and get beautiful opaque ranges with crispy edges. The possibilities for layering in this process are thrilling.

Gouache is my new crush.

Previous
Previous

Pandemic Pup

Next
Next

We grew up rich in books