When I was a kid my father, a good artist, would take me on trips into the country, and we would paint fields, barns, and things like that. One time I asked him—he was giving me a haircut—how does one tell how good a painting is. He said something like, “The first second you see it, if you think ‘Ooooo, nice,’ then it’s probably a pretty good painting.” That made an impression on me.

I am a registered architect, and being that has given me a lot of practice over the years with drawing and colors. The best prize for painting I ever got was a first prize from the Maryland Federation of Art for a little watercolor sketch of my Volkswagen. My paintings can be found in several collections including the Dries Collection in Milwaukee.

Rather than painting things, I like to paint spaces. Obviously, you can’t paint nothingness, itself. But you can represent nothingness (i.e. space) by painting things beyond and around the nothingness—ordinary things that the viewer intuitively recognizes to be less important than the space he feels himself looking through or into.

I also like to paint side-lit objects. This lights up the objects from head to toe, as it were, and shows off their shapes. It also provides nice long shadows and glimpses of light where the shadows aren’t.

Another thing I like about watercolor (this is more of a how than a what) is a trick called “negative space.” The trick is to leave something white or light and to paint next to it, to make the object you didn’t paint pop out. The painter paints something to represent the absence of an object, and refrains from painting in order to represent the something. Got that?

Speaking of representing: Graphic art, and especially watercolor, should be representational. It’s not like music. The eye is much better than the ear at recognizing shapes, and when it can’t, it keeps trying—which distracts from seeing whatever beauty the painting might otherwise have. This is not to say that photo-realism is the ideal. In fact, it amazes me how far from the real world a painting can wander and still keep it’s objects recognizable. But completely non-representational? Uh uh.