Smuggling red

Here's an update on the kittens, as you can see, they are growing rapidly. Isabelle is the black and white one and Toast is the other. OK, on with the show! Here is that painting again and below it is the next detail.



Here is the middle of the painting. I would like to point out a couple of things here. One is that I have deliberately painted different passages separate colors. I could have decided to take a tonalist approach and make them, all similar or closely related, I often do. Each of those brushstrokes is a different color than the ones around it. Look at the small green tree in the center of the detail. Above it is another tree that is ochre colored, above that the hill is a grayed olive color, in several variations and then the top of the hill is covered in pines that are an ultramarine color.

Look to the right of that middle tree. See the streak of light running in front of the big white pine down to the water? It is hot.

I am doing something here I call "smuggling red".

One of the things I do to landscapes to make "em" cooler, is smuggle red. Let me explain that to you. Blue and yellow are easy to see in the landscape, the sky is blue, the foliage is green ( blue and yellow ) surfaces in the light , dry grass and other things in the landscape are yellow. But red is more hidden. It tends to be woven into everything else. Often as a modifier. You don't see it out on its own as much as the other two, but its there just the same , woven into everything else.

Good color in landscape painting often calls for recognizing the role various reds have in the color notes of the painting. There's a story about a venerable New England painter who taught a lot of workshops. At the end of a long day he would run up and down the line of students, outside at their easels when he was tired and he would just say to each of them "more red, more red!" It sounds silly but it was more than a joke, because it WAS good advice. Almost every learning painter fails to get enough red into a painting. I try to weave a lot of it in as it steps on all of those greens that are so annoyingly ...........green. It also takes the electric look out of a sky and keeps shadow notes from being too icy. Red is a wonder product!

So I smuggle reds. I am sneaking it into things, feeding it into other colors. I make a hot pink color myself and tube it up. It is the exact opposite of the color of green leaves and grass in the sunlight. I like to step on my greens with it, but it also goes nicely into skies and other places too. Some of the old landscape painters used to carry a color then called flesh, now called Caucasian flesh, I believe, for a similar purpose. My hot pink color is nothing like the old flesh color but the principle is the same.

Look along the water line at all of the reds and sienna I have stuck in there. They enliven the passages and form a nice foil for all that green.

You can see there is a warmer , slightly redder note in those passages, but I have played it up. I think there was more red there than the camera caught in this shot but you get the idea.

Let me point out to you another example in that passage. Look at the top of that big white pine.
Notice all of the red in that? You can paint the lights in pines with a lot of red and as long as you have some green in the shadow note, they look good. Nice and warm out there in the light and its another part of the canvas that isn't covered in green. I am always looking for ways to vary the greens, and to reduce the area it covers in a summer picture like this where I have LOTS of green anyways.

I was asked in the comments;

Do you consciously paint a space for your signature, or do you just sign it somewhere after the painting is finished?

I always sign a painting at the lower left, as that is the traditional place to do it, and I want it found. Sometimes ,very rarely there is a design reason to put it in the lower right. I don't usually use any design strategy to make my signature fit, but I do try to paint that corner with very little impasto (texture). I always let a painting dry before I sign it. Signing over a rough surface is a nuisance. I often have to wipe it off a couple of times before I get a good signature, I couldn't do that on a wet canvas I sign with a rigger. I make a point of getting the signature on straight. The lip of the frame is going to be right there, and will show up a crooked signature. If you want to sign on an angle, make sure it is enough of an angle so that it looks deliberate.