How the Louis Redstone Watercolor's found it's way to Co Tour Art
Kalissa Maxwell first encountered the watercolor work of Louis Redstone not through an archive or a formal introduction, but through a quiet moment of looking. At the time, Redstone was already well known in Detroit as an architect—his buildings woven into the city’s civic and cultural fabric. What was less visible, almost hidden in plain sight, was the depth of his work on paper.
Redstone’s watercolors were not studies or side notes to his architectural practice. They were complete, rigorous, and sustained. Over time, it became clear that he had devoted himself to abstraction in a way that felt both singular and unresolved in the larger historical record: a mid-century modern abstract expressionist working almost entirely in watercolor.
This realization did not arrive as a claim to be proven, but as a question that lingered
How had this body of work remained so quietly held?
Watercolor can often be treated as study versus final finished work. In Redstone’s hands, it becomes structural and architectural, fields of color held in balance, tension, and restraint. The works breathes, suspended in time as if the paper still wet. They carry evidence of decision-making, revision, and patience. They ask for proximity and time.
For Kalissa, encountering these paintings felt less like uncovering a secret and more like being entrusted with one.
Redstone’s dual practices, as architect and painter, do not compete. They inform one another. The same sensitivity to proportion, rhythm, and spatial experience that shaped his buildings is present in his abstract compositions. Color behaves like material. Space is constructed, not filled. Silence is as important as gesture.
What struck Kalissa most was not only the quality of the work, but it’s clarity of commitment.
Louis Redstone returned to watercolor again and again, across decades, as a primary mode of expression. In doing so, he created a body of abstract expressionist work that resists easy categorization and sits slightly apart from dominant narratives of the period.
This sense of being adjacent rather than central, deeply rigorous yet modestly positioned, resonates with Co Tour Gallery’s own beginnings. There is something meaningful about allowing overlooked or quietly held practices to be seen with care, rather than fanfare.
Presenting Redstone’s work is not about revisionism or correction. It is about attention. About letting the work speak at its own volume. About making room for a legacy that was never meant to shout.
In the context of the gallery’s meditative grounds, these watercolors feel especially at home. They reward slowness. They change with light. They ask the viewer to notice subtle shifts rather than grand declarations.
This is how the work found us:
through patience, proximity, and sustained looking.
And this is how we hope visitors will encounter it, not as an answer, but as an invitation.
Written by KALISSA MAXWELL
Kalissa Maxwell, owner of Co Tour Gallery, is a practicing artist and jewelry designer and has collected art for many years. She is a fifth-generation Detroiter with family ties to Augustus Woodward. Kalissa became rooted on the eastside when she purchased an old Baptist church built in the Greek Revival style. The church is a humble single-story wooden structure with a gabled roof.
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