Pam Brock’s Watercolor Techniques Have Evolved

Art has been a mainstay in new Anderson Artists Guild member Pam Brock’s life. As a child, she’d sit at the window in her home in Alexandria, Virginia, and draw the houses she saw across the street. After her family relocated to Greenville, S.C., for her dad’s job with Southern Railroad, she attended Furman University, majoring in art. Then she taught junior high art for four years. She also later operated a children’s boutique called Butterflies and Bullfrogs on Antrim Drive in Greenville.

Even after she left teaching to start her family, art found a way, whether she was volunteering to help with arts and crafts in her children’s classrooms or working as a substitute teacher. And when she became the main caregiver for her mom 20 years ago, painting with watercolor was practical. “It was a medium I could [quickly] clean up and go to her,” said Brock. And during the pandemic, art became a source of solace in a confusing time. “When Covid hit, I heard that still, small voice to paint,” she said. “Nobody knew what was going on. I turned to flowers.”

Now that her children are grown, Brock has the time to explore her passion for watercolor, which she enjoys for the challenge of not being able to control it. And her approach has evolved. “When I first started, people asked if the paint was acrylic,” she said. “I put it on so heavy because that was my training. But now I’m learning to glaze and to put color over color.”

She also now stretches the paper after soaking it. “It dries out before I start,” she said. “It’s a huge technique; I get that brilliant, pure color.”

Her subjects include flowers, landscapes, and her grandchildren as babies. She also paints a lot of old buildings like those she saw on trips to Europe.