Joseph Zbukvic is a well known painter who is considered a modern master of watercolor, and I would add that within that discipline, he is also a master of suggestion.

His paintings of urban scenes, rural landscapes, harbors, boats and many other subjects often appear rich with intricate detail, but on closer inspection reveal that he has skillfully prompted your mind’s eye to fill in much more detail than he has actually provided.

Zbukvic works primarily with a muted palette, at times punctuating his compositions with brief passages of high chroma colors.

If you search YouTube, you can find a number of videos featuring his work or showing him demonstrating technique.

I was particularly impressed wit this one. Starting at 36 minutes into the video, he demonstrates creating a simply suggested scene, and then proceeds to overpaint it into a completely different scene — twice, in watercolor!

Zbukvic’s work is currently on display in an extensive solo exhibition at Principle Gallery, Alexandria. The show is on view until November 27, 2023. Their site offers an interview with the artist.

While it’s not unusual for artists to transition from a career in commercial art to gallery art, English artist Richard Thorn came to painting from a career as a jazz musician.

Thorn uses watercolor in a manner I particularly enjoy — lots of crisp, controlled edges balanced with softer ones and still maintaining a feeling of freely applied color.

His compositions are filled with light and atmosphere, often eveoking the look of the countryside in strong light and shadow.

Thorn’s website features work for sale as well as prints, and information about his instructional video course from Domestica. He also has a YouTube channel.

The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Three: Ji’nan to Mount Tai, (detail), Wang Hui; ink and color on silk. In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This is just the beginning image from a hand scroll that is roughly 26 inches high and over 45 feet long (68 x 1394 cm).

Wang Hui was a Chinese pinter active in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The Met’s website includes an essay on Wang Hui and his place in the history of Chinese art.

While most traditional Chinese ink painting is done in black and subtle variations of gray (which are often referred to as “colors”), the more conventional meaning of color is evident in some, and this is a beautiful example of the latter.

In the reference to “ink and color”, I believe the paint is water based, similar to watercolor or gouache, but with more binder, alowing it to adhrere to silk.

The page for this work on the Met’s website includes the entire scroll presented as a series of panels (that read right to left). They are all beautiful, and this one is exceptionally so. As in much traditional Chinese landscape painting, the people are dwarfed by the majesty of nature.

I think those of us who are less familiar with this style of painting tend to think the mountains are wildly stylized and exaggerated — and they are — but not to the extent we might assume. A photo of the region of the subject of this image, Mount Tai (images above, bottom), gives an indication of how severe the terrain can be.

Myles Birket Foster was a British painter, engraver and illustrator active during the mid to late 19th century. He worked primarily in watercolor, as well as engraving and drawing media.

He was noted for his landscapes, a subject of his that I run hot and cold on. I like those that focus on the evocation of the natural world, and pull back from a large number of them that offer sentimental idealized scenes of rural life.

Ian Sidaway is an English artist and author or illustrator of numerous books on art instruction.

Working primarily in watercolor, Sidaway portrays the english countryside — and places to which he has traveled — with crisp, clear, naturalistic compositions that have a distinct feeling of atmosphere, time and place.

In his books, he has been covering various techniques and mediums since the 1980s, with 32 titles currently to his name.

His website offers galleries of both recent and older work. In the archive section, you can find a number of paintings from Venice.

You can also find more images of his work on the two blogs lniked on his website, one for painting and one for fine liner ink sketches. Though not recently updated, they both feature additional images of his paintings and sketches.