by Shirl Riccetti, WAS-H Member

Contact Shirl with your travel stories and ideas: sriccetti@comcast.net

There must have been a logical reason for keeping the 2009 tour guide, touting the international packaged tours.

Honoring my New Year’s resolution to spend five minutes daily cleaning out my studio, I realized immediately why the booklet was saved. It was for the watercolors! The tour company had hired an artist to enrich the multi-tour descriptions. There were photos, but the watercolors caught the eye immediately. They were the largest, and up front, and extremely colorful.

Reviewing these pages again, over 10 years later, the watercolors still captured the dynamics of each tour. The Lisbon tour had a dancer, brightly painted, in the foreground of architecture. Even the monotones of Bryce Canyon and the same values of huge monuments were attractive. Many of the watercolors relied on the use of white spaces. To me, it conveyed a sense of 'airiness' (not an art word), and a sense of ‘freedom’. And isn’t that what the tour company had intended?

So, being a true artist, I clipped out the watercolors only, put them together and placed them in another folder. It was a reminder that watercolors, on the go, plein aire, are about ‘freedom’, and capturing life at that moment.

The sad part of this find was that, even though I searched page by page, there was no acknowledgment of the artist by name and no signature on each painting. OK then, on a practical, and selfish note, I hope that the artist received Big Bucks.

Carry on artists, and carpe diem.