Art: Gouaches in Bloomington

One of the most art-minded towns in the U.S., Bloomington, Ill. (pop. 32,826) last week put on the first group exhibition in the U.S. composed entirely of paintings in the newly popular medium of gouaches (rhymes with squash). Moreover, in spite of a tiny budget, it got some of the best artists in the U.S. to exhibit.

Stretching its yearly budget of $75 to $315 by getting Illinois Wesleyan Uni versity as well as nearby Galesburg and Decatur to help out, the Bloomington Art Association invited top U.S. artists and galleries to send entries. Thirty-one bang-up paintings were submitted by such artists as Peter Hurd, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Fletcher Martin, John Steuart Curry, Aaron Boh-rod and Doris Lee. Bloomington’s jury (headed by Chicago Art Institute Director Daniel Catton Rich) awarded a $100 prize to Raymond Breinin. Russian-born Artist Breinin’s prize-winning picture was called The Night, depicted a somber, winged symbolic angel on horse back chasing the setting sun over the roofs and spires of an idyllic village.

Bloomington’s gouache show was the idea of Illinois Wesleyan University’s thin, goggle-eyed, 30-year-old Instructor Vincent Paul Quinn, who thought his students and art-loving Bloomingtonians ought to know about one of the most popular paint mediums in the U.S.

Gouaches, requiring neither the heavy weight slugging of oil paintings nor the flyweight speed of watercolor, are the middleweights of painting, command a smaller price (usually from $50 to $150) but put on a fine show for the money. Unlike oil paint, gouache* (a combination of opaque colors ground in water and a preparation of gum arabic) is mixed with water in painting, is fast-drying, cheap and simple to use. Gouache painters need neither easels, oil, turpentine nor expensive canvas, can paint conveniently on anything from paper to wallboard. Unlike watercolor, where the texture of the paper shows through the paint, the pigment in gouache is opaque, sticks out from the surface of the paper as oil paint stands out on canvas.

* Comes from the Italian guazzo, a corruption of the Latin aquatio, meaning “watering, pool.”