Arthur Efland is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art Education at Ohio State University. He authored the elementary and secondary guidelines in art education for the state of Ohio, winning an award of excellence from the
National Art Education Association in 1982. His book A History of Art Education: Intellectual and Social Currents in Teaching the Visual Arts (1990) is frequently cited by scholars in art and general education. He has published regularly in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, Studies in Art Education, and
Visual Arts Research and has written the entries on the history of art education for the International Encyclopedia of Education, The Encyclopedia
of Curriculum and The Encyclopedia of Art published by the Grove Press.

"About 10 years ago I started painting in watercolors after being away from the medium for nearly thirty years. My renewed interest was kindled by Goethe's theory of colors. Goethe, who is best known as a German Romantic poet and the
author of Faust, also devoted many years studying how we experience color in the atmosphere. He believed that color arises at the boundary between light and darkness. Warm colors such as yellow, orange, and red are forms of darkened light while the cool colors, including purple, indigo, and blue,
are degrees of lightened darkness. The sky is blue because the light striking the atmosphere is seen against the darkness of space. He also thought that
light and dark, in giving rise to color, could form a basis for expression in art, since color evokes moods and feelings. Light and dark also have symbolic associations. This approach to color was the impulse behind my current explorations. I use pigments in thin transparent applications or veils to
create interactions between areas of darkness and light.

"A second impulse came from my study of Monet especially the water lily paintings he did in the early 1900s. He studied how water catches the light and how at the same time it captures the surrounding landscape in reflections. In a sense the reflections in water are nature’s abstractions and each painting
is in essence a meditative study. In the more recent paintings, I have begun to experiment with a wet-on-wet painting technique after which I introduce
veils of color as areas dry. I have also begun to experiment with contrasts between opaque and transparent application of color."