An old fisherman, two boats and the salty mist of a harbour: “The Sailorman” is the watercolour selected by the jury of Watercolor Golden Brush for its third edition.
Watercolor Golden Brush is an international virtual watercolour competition-exhibition based in France, founded by Narcisse Rafati. Once a year an open call gathers watercolourists from around the world; an international jury selects the works that will be part of the annual virtual exhibition and compete for the awards. This is the third edition, with partners that any watercolourist will recognise: Canson, Daler-Rowney, M. Graham, Michael Harding, QoR, Phoenix and Meeden.
Being selected, in concrete terms, means one thing: your piece is placed in dialogue with works by other watercolourists chosen by people who look at this medium every day. For anyone working with water and pigment, that is a form of study.
The selected work
“The Sailorman” — watercolour, 56×38 cm, 2026.
An old fisherman standing on his beached boat, between two vessels of different scale that build the depth of the scene. In the background, a line of dock posts fading into a salty mist. The challenge of this painting was holding together two things that don’t always speak to each other: the figurative portrait — the face, the posture, the weight of the man’s body on the boat — and the water itself, the moving sea below, with paper-white reserves left to mark the crests of the waves.
I worked in successive layers, leaving wide drying zones to keep the boats transparent and the body of the man denser. Cotton paper, slow management of absorption times, and a few controlled accidents — because in the end it’s always the water that decides where it goes.
Practical information
- Competition: Watercolor Golden Brush
- Edition: 3rd (2026)
- Organizer: Watercolor Golden Brush — Narcisse Rafati, France
- Format: virtual (online exhibition available here)
- Exhibition period: 5 June – 5 July 2026
A note on the path
Measuring oneself against an international jury is, above all, an exercise in listening. The selected works come from very different countries, and each watercolourist works the same material — water and pigment on cotton paper — in figurative languages that are often very far apart. Seeing your piece next to the others, in a virtual room hosting watercolourists from three continents, is the most honest way to understand where you are and where you could go.
“The Sailorman” belongs to a research on portraits and figures that I will continue to develop over the coming months.
Here my certificate.
