By Norman Kolpas
Even the quickest glance at one of Julia Dufault McGrath’s watercolors speaks to her painstakingly detailed painting process. Yet, her ultimate goal is to arrive at something that looks almost effortlessly intimate, whether it’s a nature scene that is “more a vignette than a full landscape” or a portrait that reveals subjects in “captured moments doing something they love.”
SAND ARTIST, says McGrath, is “my favorite painting of all time.” The work also serves as a perfect example of her primary goal for her figurative watercolors: “capturing people doing everyday things they love to do.”
Michigan-based McGrath’s love of watercolor began haltingly in a prerequisite course as a painting major at Wayne State University. “The grad-student instructor never taught us how to harness the magic of the paint,” she says. But when she was pregnant with her second daughter at the age of 29, she revisited watercolors and finally learned to respect and love the medium, treating it with the deliberation it deserves—which sometimes means spending as many as 120 hours on a single work. “With watercolors, you really have to think about the end game and plan the painting out before you start.”
Her deliberations begin with “a lot of sketching and drawing,” sometimes inspired by reference photos or, for still lifes, by objects she sets up. Once she arrives at her composition, she executes a pencil drawing on a sheet of vellum the same size as the painting will be. She flips the vellum over and goes over the drawing on the reverse side, then turns it face up again and places it on top of a sheet of 300 lb. watercolor paper—she likes Arches and Winsor & Newton—and traces over it once more, the pressure transferring the pencil lines on the back side onto the paper’s surface.
On a 2014 visit to the port city of Sa Đéc in southern Vietnam, one stall-keeper in particular caught McGrath’s attention. “Her gaze, looking straight at me very proudly, reminded me of Manet’s Olympia. I immediately snapped a photo.” Back home, that image became the basis for a detailed pencil drawing, which she then transferred to watercolor paper.
Before beginning her painting of the central figure, McGrath applied pale washes of color to the paper. “A lot of watercolor artists like to get rid of the white of the paper, which can intimidate you,” she says.
The finished painting, WOMAN OF SA ĐÉC, demonstrates the artist’s mastery of capturing fine details in vibrantly saturated colors.
Once her sketch is ready, McGrath begins the painting process. Some aspects of a subject, such as skin tones, can involve more than three dozen separate layers of watercolor. “I’ll lay down cadmium yellow light, let that dry, then go in with a wash of alizarin crimson,” she explains. “If I need it to be cooler, I’ll lay down some dioxazine violet or Hooker’s green dark or French blue. It’s like stained glass: You can see through each layer, and it gets richer and richer.”
To learn more about Julia Dufault McGrath’s artwork and creative process, visit www.juliadufaultmcgrath.com.
Credit the sunlit quality in much of McGrath’s work to the fact that, when the weather allows, she often likes to paint outdoors. “If I see a beautiful object that’s casting a beautiful shadow, it’s speaking to me. I love it.”