WINSTON SALEM, NC.- The Reynolda House Museum of American Art presents American Watercolors 1880 – 1965, on view through January 1, 2007. What benefits do watercolors, a notoriously difficult medium, offer the artist? What unique talents or inclinations do American artists bring to the medium? This selection of watercolors from Reynolda's permanent collection raises those questions and explores some possible answers.

Winslow Homer is the acknowledged genius of watercolor, and subsequent generations of American artists attempted to equal the heights he achieved in the medium. He was a master of the various techniques that watercolor required: layering washes of color over each other, rocking the paper so that paint runs over the surface of the page, scraping away color to allow paper highlights to show through, and embracing the little accidents that give a composition spontaneity and life. He especially appreciated the freshness of works executed en plein air, noting "I prefer every time a picture composed and painted outdoors." Watercolor gave him that freedom.

Painters who succeeded Homer took advantage of the medium's speed and portability. For artists who worked primarily in oils, such as Thomas Hovenden, watercolors served as a means of making quick sketches that they later worked up on canvas. Abraham Walkowitz, who made literally thousands of studies of dancer Isadora Duncan, valued the short time it took to dash off his small watercolor portraits, experimenting with different poses and perspectives. Charles Demuth may have been attracted to watercolors because polio had left him lame, and the watercolor paint sets were light and easy to carry.

Many twentieth-century artists appreciated the experimental character of watercolor. In John Marin's expressionist cityscapes and Charles Burchfield's haunting landscapes, the active line of the liquid paint brings inanimate objects to life. Instead of using the traditional technique of layering washes of color, artists such as Fairfield Porter and Andrew Wyeth tested new ways of placing dabs of color next to each other. The results, in Porter's case, recall impressionism, while Wyeth's works remain firmly grounded in the realist vein. All of the painters represented here took pains to manipulate this often-challenging medium in order to serve their personal styles.