Still Life in Watercolors

water to pigment, and the watercolor medium's ability to oscillate between dematerialization
and materiality. That each of the pieces of glassware in this still life is at
least potentially liquid-bearing—empty or nearly so in the case of the glass; full and
colored in the case of the wine bottle, with its darkly colored glass; half full and
transparent in the case of the carafe—is germane to this still life's self-reflexive selfscrutiny,
its deployment of the "what" of the studio still life to explore the "how" of
watercolor process. And, in the beautiful logic of that process, in which the relation
of form to content, medium to topic, is turned inside out, the emptiness and fullness
of each vessel correspond exactly to the range of minimum to maximum rendering:
the barely-there of the all-but-empty drinking glass, the material fullness and almosttoo-much
of the full wine bottle, and the in-betweenness—part repeated line, part
color—of the half-full carafe.
This still life also uses its vessels to explore the degrees of transparency possible
in the medium of watercolor, ignoring the opaque end of that spectrum that
Still Life with Blue Pot shows to be a possibility of the water-suspended pigment,
when layer upon layer of the same color is laid down with a saturated brush. Indeed,
where all of the Getty watercolor's vessels are opaque, none of the three vessels in
Still Life with Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit is: where the former stresses the different
kinds of solid materiality—those of metal, porcelain, and enamel, not to mention
linen, tapestry, and apple—that can be yielded by the combination of pigment and
paper, the latter focuses the eye not only on the liquidity of the solution that makes
the medium but also on the property that makes it like glass—namely, that of light
passing through its substance to refract into colored rays, so that color appears as
light rather than matter. Thus the colored bottle of wine, with its colored liquid within,
sitting between the two colorless, transparent crafts, the cruet and the goblet,
points directly to the mysterious, strangely disembodied materiality of the medium
—to its suspension of color in liquid and its translucency (light passing through) —
as well as to the way color as such hovers indeterminately between its status as a
chemical property of mineral matter and its status as a changeable property of light
itself. (Hence the philosophical doubts and metaphysical worries about color in the
Western tradition—the feeling that it has no essence and takes no secure or decisive
form—not to mention the alchemical history and modern mysticism of color. Hence
color's traditional relegation to secondary, supplemental status and its frequent characterization
as "feminine.") 16
Anyone who has seen colored glass being blown—watched it transform from
a hot, almost liquid, unformed glob of matter with mineral particles suspended in it
into a hard but insubstantial, fragile shape that evanescently catches the light and
passes from nothingness to brilliance and back again in a play of utter fascination—
has seen the undecidability of color for themselves and therefore might understand
quite immediately how Cezanne's glassware speaks directly of watercolor, the color
in watercolor, and color per se: couleur (as in pigment) and colons (as in color effect).
Perhaps such a person may appreciate as well how delicately Cezanne maneuvered
between color as material and line as gesture—the glass coming into being through
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CEZANNE IN THE STUDIO