Hamilton, Janice - Originals:

Color blooms outward in an explosion of mustard gold as the tip of a slender paintbrush dabs a light scrim of water on paper. The color swirls in each direction as Janice Hamilton, 48, slides the brush over the paper, moving the pigment, more with the water it eddies in than the brush. “That’s why I like watercolor,” Hamilton says. “It’s a spontaneous medium. “It does what it’s going to do and you have to work with where it’s going.”

She may control the movement of the paint to a small degree, the way you might control a floating mote of dust with the swat of a hand, but she can’t control the shape it takes. Nor can she control the ridged blooms of gold and burnt ocher sienna that stain outward, representing the foliage of autumnal trees in Spearfish Canyon. In this medium, the white of the paper and the concentration of the paint on it creates an interplay. The paper can be a highlight on a grape or it can show through a thin application of paint to add depth. It’s fluid, spontaneous and remarkably precise, as evidenced by Hamilton’s intricate renderings. Hamilton says she has a tendency to be too controlling. Watercolor was a way to relinquish that control, voluntarily or not. For her, that’s the beauty of it. The shape the paint takes as it seeps into fibers of the paper has an element of chance to it. Sometimes it works. Quite often, it doesn’t. But when it does, the failures can be worth it.

Hamilton is a painter, by trade and by art. She runs her own business, creating faux finishes, painting murals and stenciling. But her heart is in foliage — something in short supply naturally in this Plains region. She paints trees and flowers of intricate detail, as though the wrinkles on the bark or the petals of the sunflower were drawn with the finest of ink pens.

She began painting full-time 10 years ago after she and her family moved to Gillette from Hardin, Mont,, east of Billings, a heavily forested area. She brought her love for trees with her. “There’s something about trees,” she said. “There’s always something different.”

Her husband went to work in the coal mines. And with the nature of shift work, they knew someone had to stay at home with the kids. He told her this was her chance to make a real go of it. She began with oil painting, but with two children running around the house and engaging in the occasional water gun skirmish, that medium proved too malleable. Watercolor was the obvious move — in large part because it washes out a bit easier.

Only recently, she began exploring acrylic. And as counterintuitive as it might seem, she says she has to use a whole other side of her brain.

To illustrate this, Hamilton dabs the brush in a plastic Albertsons sour cream dish filled with murky water, and dips it into a golden watercolor on her palette. She applies it to the paper in a golden explosion of color, moving the water and paint with her brush. Acrylic applies with all the handling of an German sedan. She rinses the brush and squeezes an acrylic golden hue from a tube onto the paper. She moves the thicker acrylic around. But it doesn’t spread with single-minded randomness the way watercolor does. It applies itself only where her brush goes, in absolute control.

In her watercolor splotch, there are no brushstrokes. Only the pooled, blotchy pigment. In the acrylic splotch, every brush fiber leaves its fingerprint. For Hamilton, it is the difference between writing a poem and working an algebraic equation. The difference isn’t appreciated by some in the artistic community at-large. Hamilton says watercolor has never been taken seriously. “There’s a little bit of snobbery in the artistic community and watercolor paintings still aren’t accepted into some galleries,” she said.

It was an inexpensive, portable medium, aptly suited to jaunts into the forest. John Singer Sargent, one of her inspirations, brought the form into vogue in the early 1900s. Up to then, its use was subordinate to that of oil, as more of a study or preparation of a subject for an oil painting. No matter the stigma watercolor attracts in the minds of the artistic establishment, Hamilton sees value in spontaneity — the way it can create shapes and color dynamics that were unforeseen. In many ways, the art she enjoys is alive. “There is a point when I realize I need to move on to the next one, because I’m beating it to death.”

Alley Cats, Original by Janice Hamilton

Aquarium, Original by Janice Hamilton