The Story Behind the World’s Largest Watercolor Painting

By Jennifer Nalewicki

smithsonian.com
June 22, 2017

The massive artwork marks the opening of the MASS MoCA’s new 130,000-square-foot wing, which makes it the largest contemporary art museum in the U.S.

Watercolors are among the least forgiving mediums for artists to work with. Not only are they relatively transparent, runny and overall precarious, but mistakes like an errant brushstroke are often difficult to cover up. Still, when the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) approached celebrated contemporary painter Barbara Prey about creating what would become the largest known watercolor painting in the world to celebrate the opening of Building 6, its newest wing located in North Adams, Massachusetts, she was up for the challenge.

Over the years, numerous government agencies and institutions have tapped the Fulbright Scholar to take on significant art projects—including the White House, where Prey is one of only two living female artists to have their work on display in its permanent collection (she also designed its Christmas card in 2003), and NASA, which commissioned her to create four paintings.

In other words, Prey is no stranger to completing high-profile art projects. For MASS MoCA, it took her about a year from start to finish to complete the massive watercolor painting, which measures 8 feet by 15 feet, or 120 square feet, and is a detailed replica of the second floor of Building 6, a former textile mill, as it looked before renovations began to transform it into a museum.

The finished piece includes painted facsimiles of the sprawling building’s columns, windows and endless layers of paint. But bringing the painting to life was the easy part. It was gathering the materials to start the project in the first place that proved to be the most difficult.

Building 6 Portrait: Interior, Barbara Ernst Prey, 2015-2017

Prey wound up doing much of her work onsite in Building 6 before renovations commenced, studying the space’s light throughout the day, while also reading up on its history as one of many mills that made up the industrial town.“I spent a lot of time in the building, doing about 48 sketches using pencils to larger color studies,” she says. “I would go back and forth and compare paint chips, and I would sit on the floor doing color studies of the columns. It’s a very mystical and magical space, but also dirty and gritty with dust on the floor. But that sense of space I couldn’t have gotten without working there.”

 In a move to help solidify a connection between building and painting, Prey incorporated dust from the floor as well as ground paint chips from the columns by adding them into her paint, lending a mixed-media element to the work.

“That created a real connection with the building,” she says. “I also had to make sure that I got all of the lines straight, since this had to be a portrait of the space.”Prey’s piece is the first thing visitors will see before entering MASS MoCA’s new wing. It’s on display along with select works by artists James Turrell, Robert Rauschenberg, Jenny Holzer, Louise Bourgeois, Laurie Anderson and Sol Lewitt. With the recent addition of roughly 130,000-square-feet of gallery space, MASS MoCA is now the largest contemporary art museum in the United States.

This Watercolorist Thinks Big

by John Seven, August 22, 2017

Barbara Ernst Prey super-sizes watercolor, a medium often reserved for smaller works, for MassMoCA’s new wing Building 6. 

When Mass MoCA asked watercolorist Barbara Ernst Prey to capture on canvas the pre-renovation state of its new wing, Building 6, for the space’s opening, Prey thought such a big event deserved a painting of equal magnitude. The result is her largest work to date, 8 feet by 15 feet, taking a year and a half to complete.

It’s certainly huge, but the work is just as much about her relationship with Mass MoCA. In her student days at Williams College, where she is currently an adjunct professor, her teacher and mentor, S. Lane Faison, took her on a tour of the space that would become the museum, which Prey now sees as bringing her full circle.

“I really wanted to stretch the watercolor medium, take it in a whole new direction because no one’s done this,” Prey says, “but I was really interested in the space because I had a personal connection, and I think that comes out in the painting. It’s not just coming and doing a commission. It’s something where I lived there, I spent a lot of time in the building looking at the space, thinking about the space. I was there in my down jacket when it was dusty and dirty, and I would come out with dust all over me.”

Pencil study for final work, 5″ X 10″, Barbara Ernst Prey

Prey grew up in an art studio. Her mother was head of the Pratt Institute design department and Prey started painting as a small child alongside her mother. She’s since had work commissioned by NASA and for the 2003 White House Christmas card, but the Building 6 painting truly kept her on her feet, both figuratively and literally.

“You’re up and down,” she says. “I always like to step back and see. That’s my process—go back and see how it integrates with the whole. I’m painting something that is a defined space, but my painting is really abstract going into the structure so I’m always comparing different parts of the painting and going back and going up and down. Very aerobic.”

This came after a significant time just planning the work, which the scope of the work demanded. Merely tracking down a source for oversized watercolor paper took time and Prey had to figure out positioning such a large piece at an angle to prevent drips, while at the same time working from a ladder and scaffolding.

Prey working at the studio

Working on details

Prey started the process with nearly 50 on-site color studies. She continued work in her New York studio but moved everything to her Williamstown studio to be physically closer to the space. The final work also features experimentation of material not often found in watercolors—dust, dirt, and paint chips from the space embedded in the painting.

Though the work was daunting in the beginning Prey is pleased with the outcome, so much so that she’s not inclined to think small if she doesn’t have to. “It was actually pretty scary,” she says. “When you’re looking at this huge white piece of paper and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, how in the world am I going to pull this off, how is this going to work?’ Then you just dive in and work and work. I want to continue large. I feel like I can do this, whereas in the beginning I thought, ‘How do I do this?’”

The World’s Largest Watercolor Goes on Display at MASS MoCA

VICE

by Andrew Nunes

— Barbara Ernst Prey’s gigantic painting is on view at the North Adams institution.

MASS MoCA just unveiled Building 6, a massive addition of 130,000 square feet of exhibition space, and to inaugurate the new wing, more than a dozen exhibitions by a powerful array of blue chip artists are on display, one of which is something of a meta-show. Barbara Ernst Prey‘s Building 6 Portrait: Interior consists of a singular work—a giant, framed, 8′ x 15′ watercolor painting depicting the pre-renovation version of the same space the piece is housed in.

An unusual (but quite interesting) commission to say the least, the painting is something of a cultural preservation of an older America. “Building 6 had been vacant since the early 1980s. It has seen so much use as a bustling epicenter to American industrialism, yet when I did a walkthrough of the empty space with MASS MoCA director Joseph Thompson in September 2015, you could hear a pin drop,” Prey tells Creators. “The eerie silence of the cavernous space combined with the way the natural light hit it was otherworldly. Before it was to be repurposed again, I wanted to capture that ethereality, and the best way to do that was by using the dreamy, delicate-yet-technical medium of watercolor painting.

MASS MoCA Building 6, installed

Prey’s painting, the result of a two-year endeavor beginning in 2015, is also notable for a variety of reasons beyond offering a historical slice of an iconic building. For starters, Building 6 Portrait: Interior is quite literally the largest-known watercolor painting ever created in terms of total square footage. Its sheer size is more than just visual grandeur; it’s also an incredibly technically challenging feat to accomplish, considering how watercolor dries much quicker than other forms of painting, and how mistakes are near-impossible to cover up in this particular medium.

Historical photo of Building 6 Courtesy of MASS MoCA

This is precisely the reason why the painting took Prey such a long amount of time to complete. In order to fully attune herself with the space and the painting to-be-made, the artist embarked on a long series of spatial studies of the disused building, before creating an initial structure drawing of the space, a process which, in itself, took an incredibly long time.

“Once MASS MoCA commissioned me, I was granted a few months to be able to spend time alone in the empty building to create these on-site studies,” Prey explains. “I wanted to capture how the light hit the industrial beauty of the building’s architecture, combined with the sheer emptiness of this formerly bustling factory hub. One can only imagine the constant mechanical and conversational cacophony it housed for two centuries.”

Painting in the studio

“My approach to painting has always had an extremely technical core, but with an interpretive, site-specific execution. So, in this case, I did 48 advance studies and a to-scale base sketch with perspectival accuracy, but executed the work itself in varied layers of watercolor washes with paint chips and site debris mixed in,” she adds.

Even Prey’s initial studies involved a multiple-step process. “I initially began with small studies working out the composition and value and, in this commission, choosing which view I would paint of the vast un-renovated space,” the artist reveals. “After the pencil drawings, I moved to color studies. They began small, as I was unsure of the saturation of the color, and then I moved to larger studies. The last study was 32×40″, which is tacked up on the wall as a reference for the final painting.”

Detail of Building 6 Portrait: Interior, Barbara Ernst Prey, 2015-2017

Beyond the cultural significance of the work, the whole process was something of a spiritual journey for Prey. “On a personal level, this was all about exploring uncharted territory. But perhaps the most important thing to remember was that I really couldn’t make a mistake, which is the scary part about watercolor. It is the most unforgiving medium, and working in it on such a grand scale was an endurance-based process.”

Maine artist makes what may be the world’s largest watercolor

BY BOB KEYES STAFF WRITER

PORT CLYDE — Barbara Prey has a golden resume: a bachelor’s degree from Williams College, a master’s from Harvard and a Fulbright scholarship, which she used to study baroque art and architecture in Germany. One of her first jobs was drawing illustrations for the New Yorker.

Her watercolors have been used for two White House Christmas cards, and her paintings are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Brooklyn Museum and hang in U.S. embassies around the world.

Barbara Prey’s studies of her painting, which was commissioned by MASS MoCA, are on display in Port Clyde.

IF YOU GO

BARBARA PREY: “MASS MoCA: STUDIES FROM A MUSEUM COMMISSION”

WHERE: Barbara Prey Projects, 855 Main St., Port Clyde

WHEN: Through Sept. 20; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily

INFORMATION:barbarapreyprojects.com or 372-8087

Barbara Prey in her studio in Port Clyde next to studies of her painting that is now hanging at The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Staff photo by Shawn Patrick Ouellette

But for all her accomplishments, Prey, who lives part of the year in Maine, has lacked an enthusiastic endorsement from a leading contemporary art museum. That changed recently, when the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams commissioned her to make what the museum believes is the largest existing watercolor painting.

MASS MoCA, the country’s largest contemporary art museum, after its recent expansion, and a taste-maker in contemporary art since it opened in 1999, challenged Prey, a landscape painter in the tradition of Andrew Wyeth, to make a large-scale painting showing the museum’s new home in a former mill complex before a renovation and expansion added 120,000 square feet. The museum wanted to document the mill while the patina of the peeling paint and unfinished wood floors were intact.

“MASS MoCA Building 6” in part reveals artist Barbara Prey’s interest in architecture, which has surfaced throughout her career. Image courtesy of MASS MoCA

Prey gave them “MASS MoCA Building 6,” which preserves the former factory in its raw state, with dusty floors and red-brick walls. Unframed, the painting is 8-by-15 feet. Prey used three 8-by-5 sheets of paper. Framed, it’s a foot larger in each dimension and weighs about 300 pounds.

If there are bigger watercolor paintings out there, the museum can’t find them, said director Joe Thompson.

“We think it may well be (the largest), but it’s very hard to pin that down with any kind of certainty,” he said. “We can’t come up with any bigger, but I don’t know that was necessarily a goal, either. We talked about creating a watercolor that makes you feel like you are in the space that’s being depicted.”

Prey at work. Framed, “MASS MoCA Building 6” weighs about 300 pounds. Photos courtesy of MASS MoCA

Thompson suggested the project to Prey, because of his personal admiration of watercolorists who “achieve a frictionless ease” in their paintings, and he puts Prey at the top of his list. At a Berkshires cocktail party a few years ago, he challenged her to blow up the scale and try something really big. “I asked her almost as a coy joke, and she just sort of laughed. As is her way, she leapt at the challenge,” Thompson said.

She proposed an interior portrait of the building, drawing on her interest in architecture that began in college and has resurfaced throughout her career, including in a series of interiors of Maine meetinghouses that she did after Sept. 11.

As old New England mills are, the space is huge. The second floor, on which the painting is based, is more than an acre, with 400 columns and hundreds of windows. There are layers of paint and decades of grime. It was a textile mill and an electronic component plant before becoming a cultural destination.

The painting was unveiled when the new space opened in the spring and is hanging in the prowlike atrium of the new Robert W. Wilson Building, along with art by leading contemporary women artists Jenny Holzer, Louise Bourgeois and Laurie Anderson.

While the large-scale original will hang for up to three years in Massachusetts, Prey is showing a dozen pencil drawings and watercolor sketches of the MASS MoCA commission through Sept. 20 at her gallery in Port Clyde, along with the colorful, representational paintings of the Maine coast that have made her popular with presidents, actors and everyday Mainers. One of the paintings on view in Maine is her final study for the interior mill space, about 24-by-40 inches.

A column study of the mill space.

The horizontal painting shows the empty mill, floor to ceiling, looking between two rows of descending columns, which dwindle in size and create the perspective of a vast, open plain of space. Windows along the brick walls flood the surface with light. Her biggest challenge was keeping plumb the drawn lines of the windows and columns to achieve the perspective of looking through space.

Because of the fragility of watercolors, MASS MoCA is committing to a three-year exhibition, Thompson said, and even that duration might be risky given the light-filled nature of the space where it is mounted. “Barbara was very brave to allow us to show it where we are,” he said. “We will monitor it and see how it holds up from a conservation point of view.”

Prey, who has been painting more than four decades, witnessed the transformation of the mill from the time she was a student at Williams College in nearby Williamstown. She has stayed connected to the community as an adjust faculty member at Williams and by maintaining a studio in Williamstown.

It was there she did most of the work on the painting, because the proximity allowed her to travel between her studio and museum during the renovation to sketch, monitor the light and check other details of the space as it was being transformed. “It was disappearing as I was painting it,” she said.

Watercolor light study.

Prey worked on the MASS MoCA project for about two years, though most of the first year was spent figuring out what she would do and how to do it. “The whole process is ground-breaking and sort of new,” she said. “There was not a model that I could follow or a prototype to look at. People have done large watercolors, but they say this is the largest.”

Her early research was technical – where to buy paper for a painting this large, what kind of paint to use, what kind of brushes. After sketching and drawing, she spent six to eight months painting, first at her studio on Long Island, New York, where she lives most of the year and returned to after leaving Maine last fall, and later in western Massachusetts, where she spent most of the winter and spring. She completed the painting in April.

To make a detailed painting so large, she treated it as a series of small paintings, concentrating on a section at a time. Because watercolors are unforgiving and dry quickly, she had to plan and test nearly every aspect of the painting ahead of time. She made several mistakes. She used a shade of red for her bricks that brought unexpected results. Early on, she represented the wood floor by drawing lines, and later changed her mind. And on her final day of painting – one of her final acts – she knocked over a jar of brushes and water, spilling both from her scaffolding onto a section of the paper’s finished surface, discoloring it and gouging it.

A pencil study of the old mill which, once renovated and expanded, became the new home to MASS MoCA. The second floor, on which Prey’s painting is based, is more than an acre in size, with 400 columns and hundreds of windows.

She was able to fix each of those errors – by quickly brushing out the offending red, spending three days erasing the lines on the floor and blotting the water and brush marks before they dried.

Prey has operated a gallery on the St. George peninsula every summer for most of 40 years, usually featuring her colorful, representational watercolors of the region’s shingled homes, rugged dories and stout spruce trees. With her work, she attempts to capture the evolving culture of Port Clyde and the surrounding fishing communities, by observing and recording. She does much the same with her painting at the mill.

Prey, 60, is thrilled be a part of the contemporary art conversation and hopes “MASS MoCA Building 6” elevates her stature from a successful watercolor painter to an influential one. Having one of her pieces on view alongside Jenny Holzer, Robert Rauschenberg and other heavyweights of contemporary art can only help, she said.

“This is what I am meant to be doing. You want to have your own voice, your own story and your own style, and this is a great opportunity to take watercolor in a new direction,” she said. “It contextualizes my work with a handful of very well-known, cutting-edge contemporary artists. To be included in that group is really exciting.”