Observed color

image; artrenewal.org

Above: Rembrandt etching, The Three Crosses,

I would like to talk a little about color in this post. I can list three different "sorts" of color. I will call them, observed color, formulaic color, and artistic or expressive color. Let me define each of these for you and discuss their uses.

The first is observed color. When I was taught to paint one of the things I needed to learn to do was "see" color. That is the ability to recognize and place on my canvas a color as it appeared in front of me. Now I don't mean the color of the object itself if I were holding it in my hand, but the perceived color from my vantage point and in a particular lighting condition. I worked long and hard to learn this and it was necessary to have an experienced teacher correct my work in order to tune my ability to arrive at the proper color. I can still hear Robert Douglas Hunter saying, I see this note here as being a little warmer than you've got it Stape, as he hit the note with uncanny accuracy. He would then turn to me and patiently ask "do you see that?"
I would compare the color he had laid on my painting with nature and the color I had put there and he was righter than I was. I could not make the color as well as Hunter, but I could agree that it WAS a certain color. We agreed on what it looked like, and I could see that Hunter was closer to it than I.

Now there may be variations in individual color perception, and in some cases they are pathologies, such as color blindness. But absent a perceptual problem I believe we see pretty much the same color.

Here comes the BUT. ......There was a school of painting led for many, many, years by Henry Hensche called the Cape school of art in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I saw Henry do a demo of a head outdoors in the mid 70's and it was an amazing experience. Hensche taught people to "see" color that was brilliant, nearly neon . I never saw it, but his students said they did. I don't think they were lying to me. They would use color to turn the form in their paintings and often used a knife to force themselves to mix the note and put it down cleanly before mixing the next one to set next to it. A number of very good painters passed through Hensches' studios and are out there working today. He died many years ago so you missed that opportunity.

I am going to throw out another qualifier here. There are limited palettes that theoretically will make any color. You get a red, a yellow and a blue. I suppose in theory that is true. However in practice you can get a whole lot more colors with a broader palette .This is the downside of a limited palette, you can approximate a lot of colors but you cant get as close as you can with more. The narrow palette does give you nice color harmony though. There are degrees of "matching" a color. If something in the landscape is redder for instance than your red, there is nothing on your palette that you can add to make your painting red enough. Here's a story to illustrate that.

It must have been close to 20 years ago I was living in Maine. It was late autumn and that was a beautiful time to paint outside there. My wife, the keeper of schedules told me that if I was going to have a piece to put before the National Academies' biennial jury for that year, I would have to make it now as the deadline was approaching.

I had been in that show once several years before and made a point of going down to New York to see it. Walking around I realized that the only way I was going to get another painting in the show was to do again what I had unwittingly done the first time. That was to make something truly weird. The jury was mostly modern guys and it looked to me that they would accept a traditional painting, but only if it had a bit of the outrageous to it. I became really sure of that as I stood before a giant painting of a dead bride. If you want to put traditional painting by a "modern" jury, ain't nothin like a dead bride.

My old friend and painting buddy Stefan Pastuhov and I knew exactly where to find strange landscape in autumn in Maine. We set up in the blueberry barrens. The blueberry barrens are about as odd a place as you could imagine. The scrubby plants cover the ground about a foot high and in the fall they turn a bright crimson color. There are a few tufts of grass and the occasional white birch but otherwise there is nothing but the red barrens, rocks and the sky. These barrens are on the tops of bare windswept hills and often cover enormous areas. Scattered about are strangely shaped rocks from the size of refrigerators to the size of small houses that were left there by retreating glaciers. It is like going painting on the moon. Unless you have actually been in a blueberry barren in the fall its hard to believe such a place really exists when you see a painting of one.

So I am set up and working away. I am using a three color palette that I fooled with for about a year. It was cadmium yellow light, cobalt blue and genuine rose madder. It cost a fortune to paint with, but I got a cool look as the cadmium and the cobalt were such clear and clean colors and rose madder has that warm glow and is transparent. Either way I just could not get the color of those bushes. I muttered and fought with it until finally Stefan came over and added alizirin and some cadmium red to my palette. I was immediately able to hit the color. Stefan explained to me that I was an idiot and he may have been right. He explained that he had worked as a carpenter and would never have tried to do a job without the proper tools .

I was able to finish the painting and it was just as weird as could be. It had a pretty good design and to make it even a little stranger it was a 26x29. Not quite square, but almost.The painting did go by the jury . It may have been the oddest painting I ever made. Although it had nothing on the dead bride.