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Above: The garden elevation of the Chateau de Versailles, known as "the Envelope," circa 1671. The Hall of Mirrors today stands on the central terrace. The watercolor is five feet long (available).

Left: A Parisian interior, a commission for The New York Times Magazine.

Right: An antique oxblood vase with mounts by Thos. Hope, private commission, London.





Welcome

For all their beauty, architectural renderings are above all precision documents. Both the watercolors of Versailles and the Chinese vase seen here are drawn as architectural elevations--drawings that, without perspectival distortion, document an object's true dimensions in scale. Traditionally, architects have created highly finished presentation drawings of unbuilt projects for a variety of reasons, the foremost being to seduce potential clients.

We developed our technique while attempting exactly that for several prominent American architectural firms and designers in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Since then, we have concentrated on architectural history, particularly that of European and American garden architecture and ornament--an extraordinarily rich and varied field that includes some of the greatest buildings and objects ever designed.

In creating our architectural watercolors, our objective is to depict the building itself as truly as possible, marshaling our research and technique to create a drawing that presents the building exactly as it is or was--or would have been, if it had been built. In this sense, our intention is to allow the thing itself to seduce, to render it in its full reality.


Architectural Notecards

The online gallery NOTE CARDS presents images of most of our watercolors, which can be ordered as quality folding cards.


Available Watercolors

A number of available watercolors appear throughout this site and are noted in captions. Selected available works also are presented on the WATERCOLORS page.

To inquire about watercolors, please use the CONTACT page for a link to our Manhattan gallery, Didier Aaron, Inc., or contact us directly with any questions you may have. Prices for framed watercolors begin at less than $1000 for small-scale architectural ornaments; most works range in price from $3000 to $10,000. Large-scale elevations of French chateaux and ornaments from Manhattan's Central Park range in price from $10,000 to $33,000 for the Chateau of Versailles (above).

Notice: copyright 2005 Edward Andrew Zega & Bernd H. Dams. All rights reserved. The written content and images appearing on this web site are all copyrighted by the artists and are protected under United States and European law. No part of this site may be reproduced in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the artists.