Portrait, cast in watercolor

Round 6
Image 2 — "Melancholy" : 3.50
The deckled paper edge is a lovely touch and instantly sells the medium, and the wet-in-wet bloom behind the head genuinely behaves like pigment spreading in water rather than a filter imitating it. But the picture is a head sitting in the middle of a splodge, and the widescreen crop leaves great tracts of empty wash doing nothing on either side. The red-against-blue is bold without meaning anything — melancholy has a temperature and this is not it — and the face, competently modelled as it is, settles into a generic handsome sadness.

Image 1 — "Nothing but jazz" : 3.80
The smartest pairing of subject to medium in the round: improvisation painted in the one medium you cannot fully control, where the pigment goes where it wants and you live with it. The face carries it — head thrown back, mouth open, eyes shut, a man entirely gone into the music — and blurring the fretting hand into pure motion is both an honest watercolour move and a neat escape from finger anatomy. The warm bass glowing against the cold blue wash gives the whole thing a heartbeat. It loses ground on the splatter, which is scattered everywhere with equal enthusiasm rather than placed; a painter flicks pigment at something, not at the whole sheet.

Image 3 — "Half Full, Half Remembered" : 3.90
The finest piece of actual watercolour technique here, and it is not close — the edge control is the tell, hard exactly where it matters at the jaw and the eye, then dissolving away through the shoulder until the dress is simply bare paper. The glass is three transparent strokes and reads perfectly. The palette is disciplined where everyone else reached for contrast: ochre, soot, dusty pink, nothing shouting. The title is the second-best thing in it, tying the half-drunk glass to a half-kept memory and giving the whole still-life a reason to be in frame. What holds it back is that a wistful beautiful woman with a glass of red is among the most painted images in existence, and the face drifts toward the idealised, which thins the very melancholy it is reaching for.

Image 4 — "Friends by the lake" : 3.95
The only artist who asked whether a portrait needs a face, and then proved it does not. We see an old man entirely from behind — hat, heavy coat, a flask by his knee — and beside him a cat sitting in precisely the same posture, both watching the same water go gold. That mirrored pose is the whole painting: two creatures who have clearly done this a thousand evenings and have nothing left to say to each other. It is the most restrained sheet of the four and the most confident, leaving bare paper to carry the sun's track across the lake instead of painting light in, throwing down the reeds in three strokes and stopping. It asks less of itself technically than the wine glass does, and the figures are little more than textured silhouettes. But it is the one that made me feel something rather than admire something. My winner.