Susan Shatter’s Watery World of Watercolor

Susan Shatter ranks among the best contemporary American watercolor painters. Other than Andrew Wyeth, I can’t think of another living artist who has done a more substantial body of work in watercolor. Shatter’s new exhibition, “Over Seas” at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland, Maine, features more than two dozen paintings that bring the fresh, translucent quality of watercolor to bear on the very element, water, from which the medium springs.

The majority of the paintings in the Aucocisco show were painted during Susan Shatter’s recent residency on the Mediterranean’s Ligurian Sea in Italy, but Shatter, a New York resident who summers in downeast Harrington, Maine, also conjures the waters of the North Atlantic, North Sea, Irish Sea, and Caribbean. On sheets ranging from as small as 12 x 10 inches to as large as 36