watercolor.b3rt.dev · Vol. I 8 entries · NC High Country · 2026

A B3RT Editorial Ledger · Issue No. 1

Watercolor in the
High Country.

An editorial field ledger on watercolor painting across the North Carolina High Country — the tradition, the working artists, the techniques, the paper, the studios, and the exhibitions that keep the medium alive above four thousand feet.

01

The regional watercolor tradition.

Two institutions quietly anchor every other page of this ledger.

The Southern Highland Craft Guild, founded in 1930 at Asheville, set the editorial tone for the mountains. Its early members treated watercolor as both field notation and finished picture — studies of gristmills, rhododendron tangles, and cabbage barns that read as documents as much as paintings. The Guild’s annual fair at the Grove Park Inn is still where a working watercolorist from Boone or Burnsville will first be seen by the wider craft world.

The Asheville Art Museum

The Asheville Art Museum, reopened on Pack Square in 2019, holds the most consequential watercolor archive in the region. Its collection of twentieth-century Southern landscape watercolors — donated and purchased across nine decades — is the reference library against which contemporary High Country painters still measure their color and their restraint. The Museum’s biennial survey of regional water media is the local bellwether.

Read together, the Guild and the Museum are the conservators of a regional aesthetic: thin washes, cool blues, the deliberate white of unpainted paper, and the steady refusal to overwrite a mountain. The painters collected in the next sections work inside that lineage whether they name it or not.

02

The working watercolorists.

Four painters whose studios sit inside the High Country watershed.

BasedBanner Elk, NC WorkingSince 1974 Surface300 lb. cold-press

Carl Plasteras.

Carl Plasteras paints the saddle valleys between Sugar Mountain and Beech Mountain the way a hydrologist draws a watershed — every run-off line earned. His watercolors are large (often 22″ × 30″), and his washes are laid so wet that the granulation of the cobalt settles into mineral patterns before the paper can drink them. Plasteras shows regularly at the Carlton Gallery in Flat Rock and at the yearly Art on the Mountain in Blowing Rock, and he teaches a single Saturday workshop each autumn at Lees-McRae.

BasedBlowing Rock, NC WorkingSince 1989 SubjectMoss & bark

Connie Winters.

Connie Winters works at the smallest scale on this list — quarter-sheet botanicals of lichen, liverwort, and the felted undersides of rhododendron leaves. Her palette is deliberately limited (no more than seven colors per sheet, almost always including a single green mixed from ultramarine and burnt sienna). Winters’s work hangs in the permanent collection of the Asheville Art Museum and in the faculty shows at Appalachian State.

BasedBurnsville, NC WorkingSince 1996 TravelRoan & Blacks

John Mac Kah.

John Mac Kah paints the high balds — Roan Mountain in June, the Black Mountains in October, the walls of the South Toe valley in winter. His strongest pieces are made on site, in a single afternoon, on a single 300 lb. block. Mac Kah is the local painter most likely to set up his easel at the roadside pull-off on NC 80 and finish a sheet before the light dies. He is a juried member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild and shows at the Toe River Arts Council in Burnsville.

“The paper tells you when to stop. The mountain just makes it polite to wait.”

BasedWest Jefferson, NC WorkingSince 2003 SeriesThe New River

Rob Armes.

Rob Armes works the longest river in the High Country — the New River, from its headwaters near Blowing Rock down through West Jefferson and into Virginia. His ongoing New River series is the closest thing the region has to a watercolor survey of a single watercourse, now in its nineteenth year. Armes is a graduate of the Illustration program at the Savannah College of Art and Design and a longtime instructor at the Florence Thomas Art School in West Jefferson.

03

The three techniques that carry the region.

High Country watercolor is essentially three procedures, in various combinations, on cotton paper.

TechniqueWhat it doesWhere you see it in the region
Wet-on-wetWet pigment dropped into a wet wash; blooms and soft edges form on the paper itself.Mac Kah’s Roan Mountain rhododendron fields; the dominant procedure for distant ridges.
Dry brushA nearly-dry brush dragged across dry paper; pulls pigment only from the tooth of the sheet.Winters’s bark and lichen studies; the standard finish for foreground texture.
GlazingA thin, transparent wash laid on top of a bone-dry underlayer; each layer shifts the color beneath.Plasteras’s saddle-valley skies; Armes’s late-autumn New River reflections.
04

The plein-air tradition.

The plein-air ethic arrived here with the artists of the 1930s and has never left.

The Blue Ridge plein-air movement is older than its California counterpart by a generation. When the Southern Highland Craft Guild set up its first outdoor painting class in 1934, the painters who showed up were already working in the field — finishing sheets under a single sky, accepting whatever the weather delivered. That ethic still defines the High Country watercolor: a plein-air finish is the highest compliment a regional painter can pay a piece.

The most visible contemporary forum is the yearly Paint Out sponsored by the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum each June; thirty to forty painters work the meadows of the Moses Cone estate across a single weekend, with finished work hung the following afternoon. A second annual event, the New River Plein Air, runs from West Jefferson in early October. Both events are open to the public, and the standards are unforgiving — pieces that read as studio work, regardless of merit, are quietly disqualified.

On site

The High Country painter carries a 300 lb. block, a tripod easel, two water containers, and a palette of no more than fourteen colors. Anything beyond that is regarded as suspect. Most painters work between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., and most finish a sheet on site rather than reworking it indoors. The wet-on-wet finish — the regional signature — cannot be re-done at home.

05

The local ateliers.

Five studios where the work is taught, hung, or both.

N° 01
Florence Thomas Art School West Jefferson · year-round watercolor classes · faculty includes Rob Armes.
N° 02
Toe River Arts Council Burnsville · two galleries · a regional juried watercolor each spring.
N° 03
Carlton Gallery Flat Rock · represents Carl Plasteras · group shows every six weeks.
N° 04
BRAHM (Blowing Rock Art & History Museum) Blowing Rock · hosts the annual Paint Out · a permanent watercolor wall.
N° 05
High Country Art & Frame Boone · working studio · Connie Winters teaches there on Wednesdays.
N° 06
Asheville Art Museum Pack Square, Asheville · the regional watercolor archive; classes upstairs.
06

Paper and paint.

The High Country standard — what is on the easel and what is in the palette.

MaterialThe local standardWhy
Paper — body100% cotton rag, 300 lb. (640 gsm), cold-pressHeavy enough to take a flooded wash without buckling; cold-press tooth gives the granulation the cobalt needs.
Paper — makersArches · Saunders Waterford · Fabriano ArtisticoAll three are stocked at Cheap Joe’s in Boone; the Painter’s Corner in Asheville carries Arches by the sheet.
Pigment — bluesWinsor & Newton French ultramarine · cobalt blue · ceruleanThe three blues of every High Country palette; cerulean for sky, cobalt for distance, ultramarine for the wet shadows on the north side of a ridge.
Pigment — earthsBurnt sienna · yellow ochre · raw umberThe earths do the work of the autumn woods; mixed with ultramarine they make the entire green range.
BrushesKolinsky sable rounds, sizes 6, 10, 14; one 1-inch flatThe rounds carry the wash; the flat drags the dry-brush texture.
PaletteOpen white ceramic, fourteen wellsCeramic lets the painter lift pigment back into suspension; plastic palettes are widely considered unsuitable for the regional wet-on-wet finish.
07

The regional exhibitions.

Five shows a working watercolorist will try to be in each year.

08

The watercolor in the local scene.

A medium that has refused to be retired.

Watercolor holds a particular position in the High Country that it does not hold in most other American art regions. In a place defined by oil painters, blacksmiths, and the long shadow of the folk-pottery tradition, watercolor reads as the most portable, most contemporary, and least ceremonial of the local media. The painters carry it into the meadows; the ateliers teach it on Wednesdays; the museums hang it in the light wells where it can be seen properly. It is the medium of working people who still keep a regular week.

The next decade will test the tradition in two ways. First, the cost of cotton paper and cadmium-bearing pigment has risen sharply since 2022; the regional standard — a 300 lb. Arches block and a fourteen-color palette — now prices out a first-year student outright. Second, the digital pigment print has begun to appear in juried shows as an “enhanced” watercolor, and the regional jury system is still deciding how to read it. The traditional position — that a sheet must be made by hand, on paper, in front of the mountain — is still dominant, but it is being argued.

What to watch

The 2026 SHCG jury will be chaired by Connie Winters and will include for the first time a working plein-air painter under the age of thirty-five. The biennial Asheville Art Museum exhibition in October will, by tradition, set the local critical conversation for the next eighteen months. And the New River Plein Air in West Jefferson will run its seventh year under Rob Armes as juror — a generational handoff that will be quietly watched from Burnsville to Blowing Rock.