Halloween (and green)

Its Halloween tonight and I am writing this sitting in the house rather than the studio, about every three minutes the doorbell rings and I have more kids at the door. Trick or treat! Our dark neighborhood of small antique homes is very charming with all of the porch lights on. We all have porches with bracketed posts and spindled railings. It could be a scene from fifty years ago.We live in town, so it is a village scene. The streets are full of people, there are big groups of adults pushing strollers and their kids are running up to the doors in costume. Paging Norman Rockwell. Would Norman Rockwell please report to the nostalgia portal? I hope my candy holds out.

Here is the finished version of the painting of which I showed you the demo week or two ago. I sent it back to the gallery of CNY where they sold it in an hour.I think the economy is turning around, at least my sales seem to show that. What a difference there has been in the last couple of months. I hope all of you reading this who are arting for a living, are having the same experience.


I am going to finish the posts on making greens with a few more things, and then tomorrow I will start a new subject. I was asked about the pink I was using. Since I tube my own colors, I can tube mixtures. My pink is my own homemade version of a color available from Williamsburg paints that they call Persian Rose. Persian Rose is a quinacridone rose and white mixture heated up with a shot of diperrolpyrroll orange. That gives it a hot undertone. It is the antidote for green though.
I call the version that I make Pornstar Pink. When you look at it on the palette it looks fluorescent. You would wonder what on earth I would do with a strong pink like that. Its enough to make a feather boa blush. Several of my artists friends are using my pink and when I make it now, I have to make about a quart. I can't easily describe to you how I make my version so I suggest you acquire a tube of the Persian Rose which is similar.

The last addendum to the mixing greens series is this. I am always urging the readers of this blog to make decisions about their art. You have heard me say things like "you cannot observe good design into a painting". The same is true with color and doubly true with the greens. I manipulate my greens a lot, desaturating them, pushing them in different directions to get variety and installing warm notes. I push a lot of reds into my greens. In the summer everything is either yellow or blue or a combination of the two (green) so I smuggle red, I wrote a post about that here.
A thing to watch out for and avoid is chartreuse, in the summer it is easy to fill paintings with poisonous yellow greens and some painters have done that, their paintings get poisonous. A great variety of greens and a careful control of the yellower and cooler greens will usually result in better landscapes. Here comes my old joke again but I do mean something by it. "I want to make paintings the color of 500 dollar suits. What I mean by that is there are loud greens in nature that would never make it onto the racks at Brooks Brothers ( a local retailer known for their restrained taste and high quality). You may want to use those hues, but do it sparingly, if you do use an acidic color, make it an accent, allot to it the area you would a tie.