Oscar Bluemner

After relocating from New Jersey to Braintree, Massachusetts, Bluemner began the most important series of his career, known as the "Suns and Moons," from which this drawing comes. In this group, he began to experiment with the watercolor medium in order to enhance its durability and sheen and to create a less expensive and more immediate way of producing results akin to oil painting. To his standard watercolor-and-gum-arabic mix, he added casein and more dry pigment, then he "varnished" each wash with formaldehyde. During this time he wrote in his journals about the process of watercolor painting: "[John] Marin floats them on with buckets of water [and] scraped out white light effects. I hammer the colors forcefully together."