Zoltan Szabo: Artist at Work

Dust jacket notes: "Here for the first time, famed watercolorist Zoltan Szabo demonstrates the watercolor procedures and techniques previously taught only to those attending his popular workshops throu0hout the United States and Canada. Although Szabo's three successful books, Landscape Painting in Watercolor, Creative Painting Techniques, and Zoltan Szabo Paints Landscapes, describe basic landscape watercolor techniques, this is the first book devoted entirely to Szabo himself and his personal approach to watercolor. The book is divided into three parts. The first contains an in-depth interview with the artist that covers such topics as how he got his start, his materials and equipment, his working methods, his philosophy on art, and his ideas about composition. Also included is a charming discussion of his 'live stills,' a term he coined to describe his studies of small living, but immobile, objects in the landscape. In part two of the book, Szabo paints eight of his favorite subjects, step-by-step and all reproduced in color. He paints a snow-covered creek nestled in a dark, silent grove of trees; dense ground fog veiling grassy slopes; shadows etched in sunlit snow by tracks and a picket fence; the texture of old wood in strong sunlight; reflections in quiet water surrounding a pair of fishermen; ice and snow along a rocky stream bed; windswept sand dunes; and a stormy cloud-streaked sky. Each step contains one or more details-closeup observations of specific techniques, or an unusual treatment of a particular element in the painting. Techniques used include wet-in-wet washes, drybrush, glazing, sedimentary and granular washes, lifting out, knifing out, calligraphy, palette knife painting, and treatment of such varied textures as wood, ice, snow, sand, grass, and fog. The final section of the book features a color gallery of the landscape paintings for which Szabo is most admired, with captions that explain how each painting was executed...."