After 5: Watercolor USA touches Springfield Art Museum for the 48th year

Watercolor artists can't paint over their mistakes. Each stroke is planned and precise; each fiber of paper is permanently tinted.

The medium is altogether "unforgiving," says Jerry Berger, director of the Springfield Art Museum, where Watercolor USA is on display through Aug. 2.

The competition, now in its 48th year, was devised as a way "to put Springfield on the map," Berger says. In the 1960s, oil-painting contests were dominant, and watercolor was overlooked as a "stepchild" medium, he explains. Museum directors at the time saw a niche to be filled, and decades later, Springfield Art Museum is synonymous with the event.

Many pieces in Watercolor USA 2009 are bigger, brighter and more complex than those from shows past. Elizabeth Yarosz-Ash's "Odilia," for example, is a 5-foot vertical piece that features a bright-red stem cell in front of a pointillist Jesus.

Gone are the days, Berger says, when paintings were simple, idyllic landscapes. Artists now travel to more exotic places and tackle tougher subjects. "Painting usually reflects its time," he says, and the variety of modern life is certainly inherent to the show. The roughly 10,000-square-foot gallery houses depictions of candy bars, planes, shrimp shacks, snails, old ladies and Vincent Van Gogh.

Custodians of art

This year's judging, however, was a simple affair done closer to home. For the first time, the museum used an in-house group instead of flying in a prominent curator or other artistic bigwig.

Berger joined Chalen Phillips, curator of collections, and Sarah Buhr, curator of exhibitions, in selecting both the pieces to be showcased and the winners from among them. The move saved the museum about $3,000, though it did cost them some "bling in the snob factor," Berger adds. "We're trying to be good custodians of our money."

Out of 659 pieces submitted by artists from 42 states, the three judges chose 155 for the show. Typically, only 100 pieces are selected.

Twenty pieces belong to Missouri artists, including four from Springfield, and one from California, Mo., claimed the grand prize. Loran R. Creech uses perspective to hang the viewer off a near-collapsing bridge in "Infrastructure." The piece is an impressively textured convergence of landscape and cityscape; her scene is packed with oranges, blues and quiet tension.

As the big winner, Creech took home $1,000 and the rights to a place on the front of the exhibit's catalog. Watercolor USA Honor Society, a group of past winners and jurors, purchased the painting as a gift for the museum's collection.

'Cash cow'

Acquiring new art at no cost is just one of the perks the Springfield Art Museum gets from having the show. Berger, who has been at the museum for 22 of the exhibitions, cites tradition as the main reason Watercolor USA goes on, but he also admits that the show is something of a "cash cow."

All the submitted pieces are required to be available for sale, and the museum gets 25 percent commission. That cut has amounted to $45,000 in some years, Berger says, and the museum regularly makes $15,000 on the eight-week show.

As the competition gains prestige, patrons regularly travel from California, Oklahoma, Kansas and other areas to see and buy the pieces, says Marcia Justice, vice chairwoman of the museum's board of directors.

"It's so much fun, and you have no idea what to expect," she adds.