Jeannine Wahl
Landscape watercolor by Jeannine Wahl - 18x30 cm

About the Item

Watercolor on paper Sold with frame Total size with frame 30x42 cm Jeannine Wahl was born in Geneva in 1930 into a family of papermakers who very early on passed on to her the love of a texture “to touch, to feel, to color, to cut, to wet… to create”. This discovery, in which she saw the beginnings of a vocation, led her to follow Arts-Déco where she learned about interior architecture. A few forays into the field of decoration (window arrangements, fabric designs in New York, mosaics) and this complete artist renounces the violin, abandons oil painting and turns to watercolor, where she says she found a true identity – a new reason to exist and a new proof of existence. She approaches as a self-taught artist this difficult art of the instantaneous which brooks no hesitation nor tolerates any retouching; in a courageous solitude, disdaining fashions and cliques, with the awareness of having to seek her path only within herself. “Train yourself,” she advises those who ask her to teach them her “technique.” From this uncompromising demand arise landscapes imbued with a mysterious beauty where we recognize the expression, sometimes painful, of an exalted sensitivity, at the same time passionately attached to the earth, to its colors, to its smells, and fascinated by the immaterial immensity of the sky, a vast window open to the intimacy of dreams. No frivolity in this delicate art which strives to capture the fleeting emotion of the moment: from sky to sky, violent, tormented, stormy, then suddenly calmed, Jeannine Wahl gradually moves away from the figurative to conquer this extreme stripping where nothing remains except the essential. The shapes become diluted, the contours fade and, in its often desolate moors, the light composes its music on an extremely rich palette in the colors of time. Because what the modest restraints, the controlled tensions and the dazzling explosions of this painting of great intensity speak to us is, beyond the poetic nuances of the weather, the contrasting rhythms of time passing... JEANNINE WAHL HAS BEEN AWARDED WITH MANY DISTINCTIONS, INCLUDING THE GOLD PALETTE (1980, 1981), THE SILVER MEDAL (1980) AND THE GOLD MEDAL (1981) OF THE “PRIX DE FRANCE”. JEANNINE WAHL LEFT US IN SPRING 2013

Creator:

Jeannine Wahl (1930 - 2013, Swiss)

Dimensions:

Height: 7.88 in (20 cm)Width: 11.82 in (30 cm)Depth: 0.4 in (1 cm)

Medium:

Watercolor

Movement & Style:

Modern

Period:

Late 20th Century

Condition:

Gallery Location: