Konstantin Sterkhov's Watercolor Art Blog
I don't believe I've shared this before, and I wanted to get this out there. A few years back, as I was really getting in to painting, I discovered a blog that fueled my love of watercolors in an amazing way- Konstantin Sterkhov's blog Art of Watercolor. He posts very infrequently now, as his own career seems to have taken off, but there was a time when he was extremely prolific, posting over 100 times a year! That's crazy.... That's more than 2x a week. Sheesh!
Why should you care? Because what he was doing was interviewing some of the greatest living watercolor artists the world over, compiling a sampling of their artwork, and then sharing it with us. In truth, he was working on a number of books called Masters of Watercolor that presented all of this info professionally (and a great deal more, as the online interviews are just excerpts), but its now out of print. I don't know how to get it. Thankfully, atleast theposts are now archived on his blog.
The blog is a virtual treasure trove of info on different practicing watercolor artists. I remember drinking my coffee and reading a few posts every day, day after day after day, for months. Discovering new artists and opening up doors to whole new ways of painting. It's where I discovered Joseph Zbukvic, Alvaro Castagnet, and many many others. In the beginning the "interview" posts are sporadic, but they get more and more frequent. There's one of Fabio Cembranelli, one on Millind Mulick, Keiko Tanabe, Cheng Khee Chee, Thomas Schaller, Sergey Temerev, Anders Andersson, Wendy Artin, Carol Carter, Lars Lerin, Nicholas Simmons, Piet Lap, David Poxon, Liu Yi, Tony Smibert, Shirely Trevana, Guan Weixing, Robert Wade, David Taylor, Stanislaw Zoladz, Linda Baker, Votsmuth, Samir Mondal, and many many more. The links I've provided are just a sampling.
Sometimes he does posts where he just features the work of various artists (some famous, some not), sometimes he does a post on an artist that he later gets to interview, sometimes he shares his own work, etc. The artists also feature many different approaches- some are very realistic, some quite abstract, some do portraits, others landscapes, etc. In his blog roll (below the archives, on the right) there are also links to the blogs and websites of many other artists, such as Chien Chung Wei, Keiko Tanabe, Thomas Schaller, John Salminen, Eugen Chisnicean, and many others.
I encourage people to go and explore! It will be well worth your time. For a long time, it was a bookmark on my browser. Just writing this post makes me want to go back and reread a bunch of it! :)