Winsor & Newton Watercolor Kit — 'What Susan Minot won't leave home without'

The last page of the New York Times Travel magazine often features a well–known person waxing ecstatic about a treasured possession that always travels with them.

Author Susan Minot had the following to say about her watercolor kit in the September 25 issue.

Color My World

When I travel, I always take my Winsor & Newton watercolor kit, which is the size of a pack of cigarettes when folded up.

I bought my first one in the 1980s.

It was handy to bring on trips, and I packed it into a leather pouch along with a couple of brushes, a pencil, an eraser and paper.

At the time, I was filling notebooks the size of credit cards with tiny pictures.

The notebooks have become a little bigger, but the kit is still the same.

Its plastic hinge is now cracked and held together with duct tape, and I have a backup kit that stays open on my desk.

Painting keeps me occupied in those moments when travel can be aimless and even disorienting.

Mainly it is a way to register at least some of the new impressions of a foreign place, when its thrilling barrage can sometimes overwhelm you.

Recording a scene with paint rather than film sinks you more deeply into your surroundings.

You have to look a little harder and a little longer.

And you end up with a memento.

When I look through my sketchbooks, they bring back moments that I would otherwise have completely forgotten.

Most of my watercolors are done quickly — out the window of a train in the Tsavo desert; through the windshield of a car driving through a Wyoming blizzard; before the sunbathing subject gets up to take a swim.

Sometimes I have longer to look and time to kill — peering out an airplane window while trying to render the grid on the ground as we circle before landing; sleepless in a hotel room in Omaha; on the shore in Maine, where I know I've been a long time when I notice how far the shade under that granite rock has traveled.

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More about the kit:

This compact, pocket-sized field box unfolds into a palm-size kit with two palettes for mixing, a water container, a water bottle, a sponge, and a folding travel brush.

It includes 12 colors in half-pans: Cadmium Yellow Pale, Winsor Yellow, Winsor Red, Permanent Alizarin Crimson, French Ultramarine, Winsor Blue, Winsor Green, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, Ivory Black, and Chinese White.

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$123 here.

You can listen to an interview with Susan Minot here.