Big Sur

One of my first watercolour teachers was Ed Whitney. He was 95 years old when I studied with him (as did many American watercolourists). He taught me so much about the design and composition of a painting. One of his ideas that stayed with me is to create unity in a composition through repetition and by using variety in shapes. The words he kept repeating were “a mama, a papa and a baby shape”. Sounds pretty hokey to me now but I never forgot it.