The Painted Palimpsest
Detail from Yellow Pitcher with Bachelor’s Buttons and Daisies, watercolor, 2025
Paving Over Failures: An Ode to the Painted Palimpsest
Is it driven by thrift?
by dismay?
by laziness?
by curiosity?
Is it cheating?
Is it making a virtue of necessity?
Is it editing?
Yes, and yes, and yes.
I refer to the practice of painting seemingly unrelated layers to partially finished, or just plain abandoned watercolors.
Just as not every piece of writing is worthy of being preserved or published, so there are painted marks on paper in my studio that were supposed to have been paintings but that have absolutely not met the standards of the house.
On a bad day, these failed watercolors go straight into paper recycling. On a better one, they are set aside for future consideration. Since I frequently begin two similar watercolor paintings at about the same time, so as to have something to work on while paint layers dry, what often happens is that one painting lags behind the other, and then, unfortunately, loses its appeal to me altogether.
This washed-out surface becomes the basis for a palimpsest. The historic meaning of this term in textual studies is a document written literally over another that has been scraped away. Typically, the writing support would have been an animal skin that has been tanned, split, and burnished to provide a smooth surface to write on. Further scraping away of animal matter leaves a faint impression of what was written originally; and, also typically, the second writing is laid out at right angles to what was written on the vellum substrate, making it a bit easier to read.
Depending on the type of paper I’ve used — particularly its weight — I can wash down the original surface with a sponge, wet paper towel, or running tap to remove the bulk of pigments on the sheet. This works best with a heavy watercolor paper like 300-pound, which is relatively forgiving. (For a more detailed commentary on paper weights and finishes, please see what Thinking Woman had to say about this in her November 2022 newsletter invoking the spirit of Goldilocks as a watercolorist.
Once the sheet has more or less dried to the touch, I can tape it afresh to a watercolor board; sometimes I rotate or even invert the original image, which helps me to regard it as less relevant to a new composition, just like a palimpsest on vellum.
A good acquaintance with the characteristics of watercolor pigments is useful at all times, but particularly when attempting to obliterate a failed painting. I can particularly recommend some of the more opaque pigments: Naples yellow, anything compounded with cadmium, oxide of chromium, titanium white. A few strokes of any of these can obliterate the visual distraction of a crummy substrate. Some transparent but highly powerful staining pigments can also serve in surprising ways, glazing and layering over under-layers. A few of my favorites in this category: Verzino violet and cupric green light in the MaimeriBlu brand, Winsor blue and permanent rose by Winsor Newton, and almost every brand’s green-gold. Enough of the now-fainter areas of color of the lower layer sometimes peek through to create areas of random interest that would be hard to invent consciously.
Here are some recent images that I’ve painted over works that at first appeared to have no futures. I’ve included “before,” “work in progress” and “final version” for several of them. Readers of earlier editions of this newsletter, may recognize one of the lions from the Elizabeth Street Garden. Find the the June 2025 newsletter on the garden and an August 2024 update.
A percentage of all sales of my art based on the garden will be donated to its support. Direct donations to the garden may be made through the garden’s website: https://www.elizabethstreetgarden.com/donate