About Paul Pitsker

My recent watercolor paintings celebrate the exquisite beauty of the natural world on a small scale, while also humorously exploring themes of thwarted yearning and lowered expectations. As the world was slowly returning to normal after the confinement and disruption of the pandemic years, I experienced a traumatic injury to my drawing hand that derailed my painting practice for many months and which is still impacting my productivity. Most of the paintings in my current exhibition were completed during this difficult period when I had to adjust my work habits and even the way I hold paintbrushes and other tools to accommodate ongoing left hand stiffness and pain. While my watercolors have long depicted delicate subjects and fraught situations to invite contemplation of the fragility of life and the lurking potential for catastrophe, this upheaval in my own reality drove home the lesson that one's own familiar routines can be forever changed in a heartbeat. My recent watercolors explore these themes and express my belief that color and light can overcome darkness, and that the world can be both gorgeous and unsettling, and that humor can be a welcome distraction from all manner of ills.

Watercolor has a reputation for being unforgiving -- the paint is translucent and the paper is absorbent, so marks made at any point during the process are likely to remain visible in the final result. The painting process is additive, and the image gets gradually darker as work progresses. One of my goals with the medium has been to make paintings that don't look like traditional watercolors. To this end, I use fine-grained staining pigments, smooth paper, and for the most part I avoid splashy wet-in-wet effects and grainy textures. My paintings aim to combine an intense, sharp-focus realism with an atmosphere of disquiet and a sense of the impenetrable strangeness and fragility of life.

The title of my recent exhibition, Every tiny little thing, refers to the diminutive creatures who inhabit my artworks and also to the intricate details that have become more challenging for me to paint these days, as well as to the small steps in my recovery for which I’ve been so grateful. This was my smallest solo show in many years, and it included some tinier watercolors than I’ve ever shown before. In a very small nutshell, this exhibit was about adjusting expectations but still hoping for modest miracles.