Catherine Lepp: Watercolors on Rice Paper

Catherine Lepp’s latest series of watercolors presents a striking yet delicate blend of colors on rice paper. I’m delighted to share some of her newest works with you.

You can see right away that these watercolors are not painted on the typical cold press watercolor paper. This paper is smooth, delicate, ethereal. Catherine Lepp is painting on rice paper. Rice paper is highly absorbent, rewarding watercolorists with vibrant colors, but the way the paper picks up water and pigment can be challenging to work with. A bit too much water can cause excessive bleeding. Layering requires light, careful strokes to prevent tearing the delicate paper. The natural bleeding and blending effects create beautiful gradients and soft transitions within crisp edged watermarks. These details are part of why I am especially enamored with these new expressive watercolors by our New York drawing and painting instructor Catherine Lepp. Take a look at this expressive painting of trees below, and how it glows like stained glass. 

The paintings below appear to be from the same scene. The one on the left is a fairly familiar landscape scene. The painting on the right has a similar composition, but the saturated colors and pools of vivid gradations vibrate as if life and light itself was in it!

Look at this pair of sunsets. Layers of bold color blooming into each other, as if excited to play. The yellow in the second painting is so physical it heats the paper above the deep greens, and the sun behind the sky is shy. One red line at the bottom of the composition responds to the yellow “back atcha.”

These remind me of Mondrian’s early drawings of the tree, as he was beginning to move the branches into abstract shapes. See how the rhythm of branches cuts the composition into an abstraction of lines and spaces? Catherine’s lines have higher energy than Mondrian’s organized structure and flow.

Mondrian’s Tree

These appear to be two sketches of a similar idea. The composition left is more based on value, to the right, an activity of color. Look how the pencil lines arching across the top frame the scene differently than the active orange? The colorful one is more balanced, the analogous blue, green, yellow is heavier on one side than the other.

Did you know? 

Rice paper is not made from rice, or the rice plant. “Rice paper” was erroneously coined by Europeans to refer to Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese paper, equating the white of the paper with the white grains of rice they eat. 

Rice paper is made from mulberry plants. Now you know.