Thomas Sgouros

This luminous watercolor might suggest a particular location as well as what a memory of a place might feel like. Thomas Sgouros began this series as an established artist, after he abruptly lost much of his eyesight to macular degeneration, leading him to develop a new method for painting.

As he explained in a NetWorks Rhode Island video, “I look through a jeweler’s loupe so I can . . . see values. . . . They’re remembered landscapes, they’re not acute observations of reality. . . . [They are] a recognition of the entire canvas and the shape relationships-the big against the little, the rough against the smooth, the cool against the warm, which is the language of painting and what made losing my sight not that large a tragedy in the last analysis.”

Sgouros creates depth and atmosphere by layering thin washes of pigment, each added only after the previous has dried. By then wetting and rubbing out sections, he reveals the underlying colored layers, whose tints are otherwise merely suggested in their combinations.