As you’ll read in our February issue, which is currently making its way out to subscribers, the first Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary International Watermedia Masters opens today in Nanjing, China, marking the first formal international event of its kind in the country.

Cheng-Khee Chee, who met some fellow watercolorists from the Jiangsu Watercolor Society when his solo exhibition made a stop in Nanjing in 1987, was selected to nominate United States artists to take part in the event. (His Koi 2003 No. 10 (22x30) is pictured here.) Click here for Chee’s behind-the-scenes account of the show (which remains on display through Dec. 2).

Update (1/8/08): Click here for Chee's thoughts on the show.

Last month, the National Watercolor Society(NWS) announced the winners of its 87th Annual Exhibition. You can see the show through December 9, 2007 at the Brea Cultural Center. Or, catch the Travel Show when it passes through a town near you. Jurors selected 100 winning paintings from almost 1,200 entries, representing artists from every state and several foreign countries.

The winner of the Watercolor Magic Magazine Award was Jacqueline Clark of Florida. Her Homage to Degas (22x23) is shown here.

One way to to see all of the winning paintings is to order an exhibition catalog--we just got ours and it's luscious. You'll find a Watercolor Magic contributor on the cover: Nicholas Simmons won the NWS Purchase Award, with Silver Star for his painting Fresh Sushi.

If you're looking for artistic inspiration--or just a way of avoiding the (sometimes very hard) work of painting--you might consider Found Photos, if you haven't already.

Intrigued by the photos he found in a fileshare network, the site's creator Rich Vogel, began sifting through them and compiling archives of his favorite shots. Scrolling through his selections can get  heady--it's a bit like watching the secret lives of others--but at the same time, it's a good lesson in how the ordinary can become extraordinary. Sometimes it's all a matter of context and sometimes it's the audience that makes the art.

Join the Found Photos mailing list and recieve found images by e-mail here. I pulled the selections shown here from several different archives. I'd love to include about 110 more.

In September of 2006, I began a conversation with artist Joseph Raffael that was to become what I can only describe as an experience, and certainly one of the best that I’ve had as an editor at the magazine.  It began simply enough—we talked about art and we talked about the artist's life and we talked about his big beautiful paintings and the big beautiful worlds happening inside them—but those early conversations were to become the root of one of the most meaningful features in the magazine, one that has reverberated in ways not even I could have expected.

Our June 2007 issue created a stir among our readers, many of whom wrote to us—and Raffael—of their admiration for his work.  They told us how inspired they felt and they sent us the paintings to prove it.  They said they wanted to see more, hear more, and be there when it happened.  And we promised to deliver:

With our first video exclusive, we take you inside the world of those big beautiful paintings. Join us on a guided tour of the most recent exhibition of Raffael’s work at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York City: Curator/gallery owner Nancy Hoffman offers special insight into the show she describes as “a window to new artistic terrain” and the artist opens his journals to reveal the painting process that brought the work on display into fruition. Click here to enter.