Introduction to Watercolor with Beverly Brodsky

We will begin with simple sketches and work toward completing the composition. The instructor will demonstrate and help students compose their watercolors and improve their techniques with abstract washes, wet-into-wet techniques, dabbing, and dry brush. A variety of approaches are encouraged in terms of realism as well as abstraction. Subjects will include the landscape, seascape, and still life. We will be experimenting with a variety of exciting materials to create textures, such as salt, plastic wrap, and wax resist. The instructor will exhibit samples of a variety of professional artists’ works for discussion purposes concerning composition, emotion/expression, and intention. There is respect for the individual’s way of working as well as students’ level of experience.

 At Brooklyn College, Beverly Brodsky studied with Ad Reinhardt and Burgoyne Diller. Even before she graduated in 1965, her watercolors were included in a 1963 World House Gallery exhibition (Madison Avenue) which also showcased Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky. Brodsky is an internationally known artist in many private and corporate collections. Her museum exhibitions include The Jewish Museum (1988), The Whitney Museum of American Art (2000), Sotheby’s (NYC 2001), The Mazza Museum, and The Hebrew Union College Museum (2015). Brodsky has been awarded several painting fellowships and grants. These include The Connecticut Commission on The Arts (1979), The National Endowment for The Arts (1980), The New York Foundation For The Arts Fellowship (2000), and The Vermont Studio Center Fellowship (2010). In 2004 she was The Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant finalist, and a grant recipient in 2012. In 1977 she won the Randolff Caldecott Medal for her Illustrated book, The Golem.

From 2015-2018 Brodsky exhibited her work in several venues including Arts in Embassies in Bahrain (Bandar Seri Begawan), and Sierra Leone. Brodsky’s work was also chosen to appear in the city-wide Carnegie Hall Open Studios Festival event which was reviewed in New York Observer’s online news in connection with Westbeth Artists’ Residency. Brodsky will soon be featured (beginning January) In DISCOVERIES IN AMERICAN ART, an on-line magazine, (Peter Hastings Falk, editor). She has been teaching at Parsons, The New School University for many years.