My Process, My Portfolio: Georgia Mansur

 

By Norman Kolpas

Georgia Mansur enjoys a worldwide reputation as a watercolorist and teacher known for vibrant plein-air landscapes. But when her husband died last year, after a brave battle with brain cancer, Mansur began focusing on a deeply meditative painting process that enables her “to really tune into my feelings in a very peaceful and healing way.” The results are expressive floral images that seem to spring directly from the soul.

Mansur organizes her palette of signature colors from Daniel Smith Watercolors in a color-wheel arrangement. “If you set complementary colors opposite each other, you get a gray that’s in perfect harmony with the colors you used. It’s the gorgeous grays that make the other colors sing.”

Working from her home in the Northern Beaches region of Sydney, Australia—in a studio with a water view—she begins by using large brushes to apply “a big, wet, juicy wash” of colors—selected from her own signature palette of 16 by Daniel Smith Watercolors—on a full or half sheet of rough-textured 300 lb. watercolor paper from Arches, Saunders Waterford, or Baohong. “I want a paper that won’t buckle when I saturate it with a lot of water and pigment,” she explains. While the paint is still liquid, “I move it around to create different effects, bruising and scratching the paper with a palette knife, credit cards, toothbrushes, kitchen tools, whatever I need.” Then she leaves the paper to dry overnight.

After laying down broad washes of color and letting them dry overnight, Mansur begins the gradual process of defining the image. “I literally decided to go with the flow of the painting,” she says.

The completed painting, titled BE YOURSELF, by Georgia Mansur.

The next day, she regards the color-washed sheet anew. “I’ll turn it around from every angle to let it speak to me and see what’s emerging,” Mansur says. Following her instincts, she embarks on the next step: She uses a scalpel or sharp, fine-pointed scissors to cut out small, abstract shapes from sheets of old X-ray film. She then strategically places these templates on top of her watercolor and lifts away the areas of colored wash beneath the cut-outs, using a damp sea sponge or paper towels, gradually “designing the painting in a way that makes sense.” Lastly, she fine-tunes the composition by adding details with a tapered brush.

Mansur now shares this process in workshops. To her deep satisfaction, she finds that it helps her students “address their own stress or grief or trauma. Then they start creating the really joyful, beautiful paintings they want to create.”

To learn more about Georgia Mansur’s artwork and creative process, visit www.georgiamansur.com.

HYDRANGEAS x 2 began, says Mansur, “as a class demo, showing the students not to be scared of being a little bit wild and crazy in the first stages of a painting. Those flowers were just two giant purple blobs until I cut out my little shapes and started putting in those leaves underneath the heads of flowers and negative space behind the vases.”

Juicy puddles of orange, red, violet, and green coalesced into an exuberant study of poppies that seem to be blowing in the breeze.