A sea of Watercolor in The Wall in the Middle of the Book
John Agee’s The Wall in the Middle of the Book is about a small knight learning that things are not always as they appear. Filled with rather hilarious counterpoint wherein increasingly dangerous things occur under water on the side of the book the knight is telling his readers is safe, one of the book’s silent narrative jokes concerns a series of fish being eaten by consistently larger fish. The water and its inhabitants are rendered in bright, textured watercolours that show off just how much can be done with the medium.
On the side verso from the wall in the middle of the book, there is a sea rendered in washes of a teal watercolor on a textured watercolor paper. The washes are sufficiently thin that the occasional brushstrokes are visible, forming the suggestion of currents and waves, particularly at the top of the page where the washes grow darker. Of note as well is the fact that Agee seems to have flooded his paper, causing the pigment to break through the paper’s finish to saturate it in places, which causes a grainy, speckled effect. The two fish present in the water are not simple flat washes of color, either. The largest of the two, rendered in olive green, striped through with chartreuse and shaded with a darker olive wash, has been salted, a technique in which granules of salt are sprinkled over wet watercolor. The result is a crackling, inconsistent distribution of pigment that lends the fish a stripy, scaly texture. It also appears as if Agee removed excess water in the large fish via a knit cloth, which left behind consistent rectangle pattern as well. The small fish, in the process of being eaten, is a little more difficult to decipher, though it appears to have been dry-brushed or blotted with black watercolor once the mulberry shade that is its primary tone was laid down.
The page recto is devoid of the paint and texture rendered by its opposite, and the one creature on the dry side of the wall, the knight, is rendered in a wash so thick it almost fails to let the paper “breathe” as Shulevitz warns against. (Shulevitz 192) Nevertheless, it seems an appropriate choice for a character wearing plate armor.
Agee’s illustrations effectively create two different worlds in land and sea, and use watercolor technique to do so in effective and creative ways. The Wall in the Middle of the Book is a wealth of watercolor creativity, and showcases the diversity of the medium.
Works Cited
Agee, John. The Wall in the Middle of the Book. Penguin 2018.
Shulevitz, Uri. Writing With Pictures. Watson-Guptill 1985.
Stats: CIP Fall 2022, Laramie Hearn. Installment #1: Artistry. 421 words.