For the watercolorists on the Arteva Club’s recent trip through Rajasthan, India, wasn’t just a subject — it was a test of technique.
Harsh Agrawal, the London-based, India-born watercolorist who co-founded Arteva and organized the journey, didn’t want his fellow painters to simply witness the country. He wanted them to surrender to it. “India is not a place you simply witness from a distance,” he says, “but one you surrender to emotionally.” That surrender showed up most vividly in what the region demanded of a limited palette.
Andy Evansen, a watercolorist from Minnesota, arrived with the same restrained palette he uses at home and found himself immediately outmatched. “I’ve never used so much cadmium red in my landscapes in my life,” he says. The heat compounded the challenge — his paper dried almost instantly, forcing faster decisions about what to paint and how. His most rewarding subject turned out to be the landscape of Jawai, where rock formations opened onto sparse vegetation, and the two-month bloom of the palash tree — its branches a vivid vermilion, earning it the nickname “flame of the forest” — coincided with their visit. “There were beautiful bits of orange dotting the whole landscape,” he says, in a region also home to wild leopards, several of which the group spotted on early morning jeep trips.
Brienne Brown, by contrast, kept her palette exactly as it is at home. Her challenge wasn’t color mixing but observation — capturing the particular, luminous density of Indian light, filtered through heat, dust, and history. “I kept trying to capture it through color notes,” she says, “though I’m not sure I ever fully did it justice. Still, I had a lot of fun trying.”
Three watercolorists, three different relationships to the same intense light — proof that even a shared medium doesn’t guarantee a shared response to a place this demanding.
This is just one thread from a much bigger story. The full account of Arteva Club’s journey through Rajasthan — the architecture that humbled painters used to working confidently, the Holi festival that left one artist’s hair green for the rest of the trip, the desert dinners and camel rides and quiet mornings that reshaped how these artists see — originally appeared in PleinAir Magazine. Subscribe today to get stories like this one, plus in-depth artist profiles, technique breakdowns, and travel coverage, delivered six times a year.
