The Watercolors (pdf)

Essay by Dennis Adrian, poem by the artist

Robert Lostutter’s exquisitely detailed watercolors depict shamanistic figures bound with orchids and masked with feathers. They are an exotic mix of splendor and anguish awash in the intense magical luminance and intimate scale that are characteristic of traditional miniature painting. Dennis Adrian’s essay for this catalogue of splendidly printed reproductions from the Society’s 1984 exhibition of this work, discusses Lostutter’s idiosyncratic style in comparison with the work of his Chicago contemporaries, and brings light to the artist’s extraordinary way of creating art that recovers a unity between man and nature.