Watercolor

Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, housed in an historic Arts & Crafts style building, displays the work of abstract painter Vance Kirkland in vignettes composed of artwork by other Colorado artists, and a major collection of international decorative art from the modern era. Vance Kirkland’s studio space regularly inspires exclamations of awe from visitors, who are able to see his painting table and the straps Kirkland sometimes used to suspend himself above his paintings to create his large oil paint and water compositions, and later his Dot paintings.

Winslow Homer spent his final decades living and working in this rustic structure, perched on Maine’s rocky coast, where he created powerful images of crashing surf and humankind’s struggles against the elements—paintings that are widely considered among the greatest masterpieces of American art. The Winslow Homer Studio provides an intimate experience of the place that inspired Homer’s most celebrated marine paintings. Visitors walk through the spaces in which he lived and worked, and see the ever-changing natural drama of the ocean crashing against the rocky shore.

The Demuth Museum, located in the former home and studio of Charles Demuth, maintains a permanent collection of over 40 Demuth works, and an extensive archive, a library and rotating exhibitions. As a leader of the American Modernist movement, Demuth is best known as a pioneer of the Precisionist style and a master watercolorist. Standing in his studio, visitors can look out over the family’s garden and the city of Lancaster to see the very same views that inspired Demuth’s paintings.