Jacob Lawrence

Derived from the Italian word guazzo, meaning “puddle,” gouache is essentially watercolor mixed with Chinese white chalk. The medium is opaque, and, white gouache colors display a light-reflecting brilliance, it is difficult to blend brushstrokes of gouache together. Thus, the medium lends itself to the creation of flat, large, colored forms. Jacob Lawrence is a prime example of this abstract. In his piece, You can buy bootleg whiskey for twenty-five cents a quart, he not only creates a sense of disorienting and drunken imbalance, but also emphasizes the flat two-dimensional quality of the painting’s space. He also uses many intense complementary colors in this piece.