A truncated sub-palette and a chromium mystery device

A demo painting done in front of a class on the Hudson River near Newburg, New York 16" by 20"
(disclaimer, only the sky was done with three colors)

 

Above is a shot of my palette.  I have mentioned in previous posts how although I have earth colors and a warm and a cool or each hue, I sometimes work in only three colors. Some landscape painters work in a red, yellow, blue, whiiich is a restricted (or chromatic) palette. They have no ochers, siennas, black or umber. I don't paint entire pictures this way very often, but you can, and it gives a lot of color harmony to a painting.It is possible to mix lots of different color notes from a palette like this.

 However you  trade the ability to strongly characterize nuances of the color before you, for color harmony.

 There are some advantages though.

•  It is easy to make a "note" again for a second time, and rapidly, because there are only three possible ingredients in each mixture.That can save a lot of mixing time.
• One of the "keys' to design is simplification. Simplifying your color means imposing a system or order on your color choices that will effect how the painting looks. There are lots of different ways to artistically choose your colors  and many far more sophisticated than this one. But a chromatic palette is sort of "set and forget", you use the palette, you get the "look".
• It is relatively easy to learn your way around the combination of three pigments (plus white). I spent a year on a three color palette perhaps twenty years ago and I learned a lot about color doing it. 
• I like to use a chromatic, three color palette for things that are high key, like snow, skies and surf. Varying amounts of all three colors in each note can gives a great deal of subtly.I will use the trhee color palette for a PART of my painting,.
• If you are traveling real light, there are only a few tubes to put in your pack, not a dozen.

The most common three color palette today seems to be cadmium yellow, alizirin and ultramarine. My own three color palette is cadmium yellow light (not lemon), cobalt blue (clearer and bluer than ultramarine) and quinacridone red ( permanent rose, or permanent alizirn) Genuine rose madder is very pretty and gives a  lovely restrained tonality to mixtures but it is quite expensive. I don't set my palette with only the three pigments in practice, but I do remember that

 embedded within my full palette is a smaller chromatic one.

Below, I have mixed each pigment with white and made three piles of paint all about the same rather high key value. I would use these if I were painting a sky or snow perhaps.

Above, from mixing pool between my three pigments, or three pigments plus white  I can pull variations of all the possible colors.

Below I have a lower key version of the same thing.  I am still using some white but I am making darker, or lower key notes. Each of these notes derived from the original hues is composed of only two colors, like red and yellow or yellow and blue. These are the secondary colors, (at least those we can make on our restricted palette). I am making these samples with a palette knife, by the way.

 

 It is when the results of the notes we have made in the last photo are combined that we begin making that vast  array of more complex colors that are  frequently encountered in the landscape. Most of the colors outside come from this range, slightly to very stepped down colors with the occasional splash of something very colored (or high in chroma or saturation).

Olives, ochers, siennas and various russets, oranges and golds are created with these tertiary mixtures. They contain some amount of each of the three original pigments.

 Above is a sample of sky painted with the palette above. Except for a few touches of the white and ultramarine mixture in the undersides of the clouds it was painted with the three premixed colors

 

I can save premixed pigments easily and cheaply by wrapping them in cling wrap. They will last for months that way. If I am making a picture where I need a constant supply of a premixed note, I will make a pile of it and wrap all except for a small amount left on my palette. Notice a second pile of blue made with ultramarine on the left there. I sometimes add that to get the darks on the bottoms of clouds and the darkening of the sky as it nears the zenith. Ultramarine is heavier and redder than the cobalt, but I also mixed it to be a little lower value than the others..

  

Whats this?

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FALL WORKSHOP

I have two remaining spots in my fall workshop October 26 through the 28th. That is a Saturday through Monday.

This is the Sunset Hill House in Franconia, New Hampshire. I have been teaching workshops there for  years and it is the ideal location.  Because I have taught so many workshops there the inn keepers have learned what painters at a workshop need and they are now practiced at hosting my workshops and making sure we have what we need to operate without any distractions or responsibilities other than painting.There is a broad rear porch that overlooks the mountains so we can still paint outside no matter what the weather does. The lower level of the inn  is ours to store our paints and canvas so we don't have to haul it all to our rooms and it makes a good place to teach too. The view of the mountains is spectacular and in the fall it will be even better. The inn takes good care of us. We have our own private dining room too. They handle  our meals and even bring us lunch so  we can work all day uninterrupted. The inn is one of those big old historic affairs from the 19th century and is homey and informal. Most of the rooms have gas fireplaces, and it is cool in the evenings up in the mountains in the fall, so that is nice after a day outside. It is necessary to stay in the inn to take the workshop.

I love teaching workshops. Everyone is always excited to be there and hang out with the other artists. It is like a three day party. We go from breakfast until bedtime. This is a total immersion program and I run the class about 12 hours a  day. I do an evening lecture while we wait for dinner to be served.

. We don't need to leave the grounds of the inn  to find great subject matter so their is no problem with hauling easels around or caravanning cars to daily locations. We just walk out the back door and the whole Presidential range is spread out before us.

The schedule includes;

• a demo every morning, on the first day I explain the palette and the various pigments.
• In the afternoon the students paint and I run from easel to easel doing individual instruction and try to diagnose each students particular barriers to better painting.
•  after the demo each day I run  a series of exercises  teaching root skills like creating vibrating color and the parts of the light (that is what you need to know to establish light in a painting) I will also teach how to most effectively "hit" the color of nature outside.
• I do a presentation before dinner with images from my laptop. One is a history of White Mountain art so you can see what the greats of American painting did with the same landscape we will be painting during the day.  In the 19th century all of the great Hudson River painters made a point of being there too, just a few miles up the road from the inn. The other lecture is unpacking out  the design ideas in the works of great landscape painters, particularly Edward Seago and Aldro Hibbard, two favorite painters of mine.
•  I will work you like a borrowed mule.

 The cost of the workshop is 300 dollars. Click here to sign up.  I charge a 150 deposit up front when you register. In return for that I will hold your place in the class. I wont give away your place to anyone else, so I don't return deposits.

 Lodging reservations must be made with the inn who will provide a discounted room package deal to my students, it is absolutely required that you stay at the inn to take this workshop. Well, actually, if you must stay off "campus" call them and they will arrange a day rate for you which will cover your meals etc. Here is the Sunset Hill House web site

Some notes of caution on overstating variations within the shadow

Above is a shot of some gates in a South Carolina cemetery. I want to use them to illustrate something about values. Look at the second shot below, see where the little arrows go?

The arrows point to areas of mortar that are lighter than the brickwork and surrounding older mortar.The tyros mistake would be to group those values with the lights, That is, to paint them the same value as the illuminated foliage beyond. But doing that will destroy the solidity of the form in the piers (as I suppose such structures are called)

I had this question arrive in my inbox;

"What about those shadows on very light objects which are approx the same tone as the half tones do they come under light or shade as they seem to light to be put in shadow the same with dark objects the light side seems to dark to go in lights  I am talking about an overall scene not one single object on its own".

I wish I was standing next to you and could see exactly the values to which you are referring. I hear this from students sometimes who just cant get the idea that the lights are lighter than the darks. I have to show them on a case by case basis from nature before them. I see few students who can successfully sort there lights from their darks.

In the landscape, or painting in the studio, there are two different ways a thing can look. The first way is in comparison to what is right next to it. That is sometimes called "looking in to your shadows" or a piecemeal approach. 

The second way is in relationship to the whole scene. That is called the "big look" of nature. The  "the big look" is infinitely preferable. It gives big masses and solidity of form. In this view the artist perceives all of the scene before him in relationship to everything else. One big picture. A painting that has the "big look of nature" is sometimes called "broad".

Looking into the masses and shadows portrays each object as it looks when examined with out comparison to the larger scene. That leads to distortions of value and a piecemeal approach .This often gives a disjointed quality to a painting,and can give the look of multiple pictures separately observed on your canvas. That will destroy the unity of effect in your painting.

IN ORDER FOR A PAINTING TO "HANG TOGETHER" IT HAS TO BE SEEN TOGETHER.

The same subtleties occur in the lights as well. There are variations within the halftones that must be compared to the whole scene and not just to the halftone nearby. That leads to an overstatement of the halftones, a condition called overmodeling which gives a dirty appearance. It is why those awful art school figures drawn on newsprint look like they have black wetsuits on instead of skin.

Several artists  pointed out to me that there are situations in nature where  a light object has darks that are lighter than the lights on a darkly colored object in the same scene. That happens, but it is still important to know where your shadows are at all times. Below is an example of one of those situations

.

Fredrick Waugh

 In seascape painting, the foam is often brighter in it's shadow side than the rocks are in the light. But the principles of light and shadow hold within the foam itself, that is, all of the light side of the foam is brighter than any of it's shadow side.

Dealing with summer greens

 

Stapleton photo: Garin Baker,

 Here are a questions I received a few days ago;

  "Dear Stape:
I learned how to mute my greens which was what I had thought was a good idea.  Now my landscapes look dead.  I live in Minnesota, a state that looks like a salad in summer.  How do you handle all those greens.  If I match what I see, it's doesn't  look real.

 ......................... probably some blonde chick

I have written about painting summer greens before and I will excerpt a few suggestions from deep in the blog as an answer for you:

I think that summer is the hardest season to paint outside. It is just way too much green for me. I do some green paintings, but I don't want to make a whole seasons worth of them. One or two in a show is fine, but a whole room full of green paintings is not. I have crashed a lot of paintings in the greenness. I always think I won't do it again, and every year I make at least one painting that is nice, but way too green.

I am not the only landscape painter to feel this way, lots of them have and there are some strategies to avoid the problem. Here are a few that come to mind.

Willard Metcalf   image: www.artrenewal.org

detail from the Metcalf painting above showing variations in greens and addition of other colors as modifiers

• Notice how many colors other than green Metcalf has put into this picture. The powerful blue in the sky also draws attention away from all that green by overpowering them a little. There is still a whole lot of green in this midsummer painting but there are enough other colors to counter the  assertiveness of the greens.
• If you must paint in a green hell, try to vary the greens and tone them down too. A green plus red is called olive, Savor those, the more red you can smuggle in there the better. The violets in the shadows aren't green either so they also serve as a foil. Ask yourself would I wear this color? There are colors in paintings you wouldn't wear, but with the greens the question is more relevant.
• Historically artists have turned their backs to the green. Many of the art colonies of America started in seaside towns. Artists who painted the hills of New England in the fall and winter painted the harbors or surf in the summer. The ocean is a great place to be when it is too green out there.
• Woods and fields can be a nightmare, but in the evening the lengthening light and the gathering darkness begin to drop the saturation of some of the green. In the late hours lots of too green places become paintable.
• Gardens are great place to paint in the summer. They are green but if you have flowers, paths, shadows or evening light, there are endless good garden pictures to be made. Most people who have fine perennial beds are flattered and will to allow an artist to paint their gardens. I have knocked on strangers doors.
• Try to look for big shapes that aren't green, such as a colored house or a yellow field or gray out buildings, any thing that you can use so that at least an important part of the canvas isn't painted green.
• Another solution is to cripple your ability to mix green. Restrict yourself to an earth color palette or at least mix all of your own greens from ultramarine. If you are restrained in the presentation of the greens in a landscape rather than literal, usually better paintings result.
• Sometimes it helps to stain your canvas with a warm earth color before painting, you might rub it down with burnt sienna and a little solvent, using a paper towel. The influence of that wet layer of sienna particularly if it gets into the notes lain onto it, can be a welcome modifier when things go green.
•  Chromium oxide green, (PG17) is a chromium color related to viridian, it is opaque, permanent and a dull green -yellow . It is a useful landscapists color. I think Metcalf used a lot of it. Give this color a try if you are experimenting with greens, it is not too powerful and goes well with earth colors.
•  The three color guys from out west, pack ultramarine, permanent alizirin and cadmium yellow, and taking a cue from them I have made a lot of greens in recent years from those. That has the advantage of not yielding greens that are too assertive. In the summer particularly the landscape can be VERY green. If you want that very green look, you can get it with viridian and cadmium yellow light. I was taught to make greens that way, but I came to feel later that although they looked like what was in front of me, they were to assertive and monotonous. In have tried in recent years to keep my greens well in check. I sometimes have joked in this blog about painting in the color of 500 dollar suits. You don't see those loud green suits on the racks at Brooks! You do see some green nylon parkas out there that are the colors I am talking down, they come from the discount stores though.
   
• We are making paintings to go into peoples homes and be lived with, at least I am,. Some artists are making paintings to impress other artists or to go into museums or whatever, but I expect people to live with mine as decorative objects. I therefore don't want them to be the color of a granny Smith apple.
•   I do a lot to replace it or shade it towards red to tone it down. I often push my greens towards olive or ocher or heat them up or purple their shadows. I don't want to make paintings that are green all over, so I smuggle red. There are three colors, blue, red and yellow. Green contains blue and yellow so I want to use as much of a different color from those two as I can . That leaves red. So I smuggle reds. That is, I try to sneak it into my greens to "step" on them and get greater variety in my color rather than green, green, green.
  
  I am particularly wary of a certain green that occurs everywhere in the lights during the summer. It is a high key chartreuse color most easily made from a combination of lots of white, plus viridian and some cadmium yellow light. Note I am not talking how to "hit" a given color outside. I am talking about modifying or even replacing the actual note of nature with something I think will make a more attractive painting. You have heard me speak of design a lot, here I am designing my color. Sometimes I want my paintings to be the color of 500 dollar suits. High key lemon greens are not something I would want in my suit.

• 
  
  

 A painting of my own with varied greens

detail from the picture above

  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 ocher 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 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. 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.

 Green is everywhere. I do a lot to replace it or shade it towards red to tone it down. I often push my greens towards olive or ocher or heat them up or purple their shadows. I don't want to make paintings that are green all over, so I smuggle red. There are three colors, blue, red and yellow. Green contains blue and yellow so I want to use as much of a different color from those two as I can . That leaves red. So I smuggle reds. That is, I try to sneak it into my greens to "step" on them and get greater variety in my color rather than green, green, green.

I make up a custom color for myself that I think of as the anti-green. I call it Pornstar Pink. It is a hot pink with indelicate overtones of chewing gum and feather boa with a hot undertone that is nearly biological. This cheap lingerie color is the opposite of the green outside, and is the antidote. I can throw it into any of the mixtures I use to make greens and it will reduce or "step on" that green. I feed it into the painting here and there to "smuggle reds".

Painters I knew years ago sometimes carried tubes of "flesh color" into the field. They would never have used "flesh ( now I believe it is labeled "Caucasian flesh") in a portrait but it was really handy out doors. My homemade mixture, Pornstar Pink is a lot more vibrant than the old flesh color but the idea is the same, a red modifier pigment. In the winter this is a good color to have for painting snow, too

When I make this color I tube it not only for myself but for a friend or two who liked mine when they tried it. So I make about a quart at a time. I have experimented with it for a number of years and have arrived at a formula that works for me. But you probably don't want to tube paint, so there is this, Williamsburg Persian Rose
I started out using Persian Rose and then formulated my own version over the years from a mixture of precursor pigments I buy from RGH, my paint supplier. Their link is over in my sidebar.

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 If you would like to know about the upcoming July workshop in New Hampshire please
click Here. I have included the cost of the workshop and information on the location in the White Mountains. I can teach you a whole lot, and probably save you years of screwing around. Why torture yourself ? Don't get left behind! You are worth it! Everyone's doing it. Act now.

I will teach about how to deal with greens in the summer landscape by applying the ideas above and a few  others, from the secret premium knowledge.

I have been developing a series of painting exercises to teach root skills. I have a bunch of them now and am adding them into the workshops. I set my easel up in front of the class and lead them through a painting exercise that will clarify either a skill, technique or principle. I will be presenting one of these each day at the July workshop.

Premix the color of your light

Sanford Gifford, Kauterskill Clove

Light has color, as a landscape painter you need to identify what that color is (or what color you are going to use) in a painting. Often the light is warm and butter or honey colored ,late on a sunny day. But on a gray day it might be cool or even silvery. There are situations when the landscape is suffused with red light. It is very useful to mix the color that is in your light and have a pile of it on your palette. Most of the colors of objects in the light will be effected by it. You can feed this color into whatever the light is hitting. This is useful for two different reasons. One it saves you having to mix every color in the light from scratch. You can inject a mix of the local or apparent color of the object with your light mixture and get pretty close to its illuminated color. This saves a lot of mixing time on location and clearly communicates what is in the light an what is not. On a sunny day I am going to expect to mix a red and a yellow into a lot of white to make the color of the light. What red and which yellow can be adjusted depending on the look of the day and what you have on your palette.

Above is a painting by Sanford Gifford that is suffused with the color of the light. Her has pretty much used the color of his light to paint everything that takes light from the sky. If it turns towards the sun, it gets the yellow mixture into its' note.

Here is another Sanford Gifford with golden light. One of the things that routinely happens in nature is that the color of the shadow is, or at least contains, the complement of the color of the light. So a golden sunset will call for blue or violet shadows. If you have the color of your lights it is easy to come up with an opposite color to add to your shadows. The complement of the light will form a major part of your shadow note and can be fed into those to establish the shadow color.

When I paint outside I have a pile of paint that is the color of my lights, I use it for underpainting the sky to get light in that, and I use it to more easily and swiftly create the color of things in the light.

I don't really make a shadow color, but I am always aware of what it is. On a sunny day I like to feed cobalt violet into my shadows, so  that functions as a premixed shadow. I also like to throw ultramarine and burnt sienna at my shadows, by varying the mix of the two I can control my color temperature there. Burnt sienna is great for heating up shadows, particularly in their reflected lights. I like to heat up my deepest shadows. the darkest accents work best if they are fiery hot. Often I am installing this because I like the way it looks rather than because I have observed it.

Having a standard color laced into my lights tends to unify a painting. rather than a mosaic of unrelated colors the lights are "coded" through by a constant note. If something out in nature has an interesting color that doesn't conform to this system I am free to disregard my  systematized light. But generally the light does have a color and that influences every surface it hits and determines the shadow color too with its complement.

The Sanford Gifford above was painted using a systematic color for the light. This painting was no doubt done in a studio from a drawing made on location, or a painted sketch. He did not stand out in the field with that canvas matching the colors of a sunset. He invented it and imposed it onto his drawing. Gifford "fixed" a color for his light and used it through out his painting.He got a believable light effect and the painting is suffused with his light color that he has sown into the entire  tableau.

Plein air palettes.

My discussion of additions to a three color palette prompted several readers to post their palettes. I thought I would post mine as long as we art discussing them. Mine is actually a little on the large side. h
Here it is:

Titanium or lead white 

cadmium lemon yellow
cadmium yellow
yellow ocher

cadmium red light
quinacridone red or permanent alizirin
burnt sienna

ultramarine blue
cobalt blue or Prussian blue
cobalt violet

viridian
 ivory black

I have a warm and a cool of each hue, I have a yellow and a red earthcolor. I have viridian which helps making all those greens and I use the prussian for that too. And I have black, I could probably live without that and often do, and lastly I have cobalt violet my favorite landscape color. I draw with it and use it for lay-ins and it is great to modify greens and make shadows. I use the Gamblin, it seems like it is reasonably priced for its quality. I also carry a premixed color of my own  I call pornstar pink that I use to feed red into my greens and skies.


Zan Barrage submitted asomewhat smaller more straightforward palette ;
the permanent rose is quinacridone, of course.

How about a cool and warm of the three main hues?
Cdm Yellow Light
Cdm Lemon

Perm. Rose
Cdm Red Light

Cobalt Blue
Alt. Blue

+
A couple of earth colours



Jeff contributed Sorollas palette. Gee thats almost the same as mine, less an earth color or two , this is a more chromatic or pure colored palette.

cobalt violet,
rose madder,
all the cadmium reds,
cadmium orange,
all the cadmium yellows,
yellow ochre,
chrome green (since replaced by permanent green light),
viridian,
Prussian blue,
cobalt blue
French ultramarine.
In both cases, he used lead white

I will be back and expound on palettes some more gotta hurry tonight!

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If you would like to know about the upcoming July workshop in New Hampshire please
click Here. I have included the cost of the workshop and information on the location in the White Mountains.

Regruppeing

I received a couple of questions about my last Gruppe post so I thought I would talk about Emile a little more . Here a question;

"Was he thinking about this while painting in the field or do you think he did some reworking later in the studio? There is so much to consider while outdoors that it's tough enough to just get the picture on the canvas. Which brings up another question. Do you think he visited the same location on multiple days? Did he go back out on this One , or did he only go there one time? "

I don't think Gruppe took a painting out twice very often, if ever, at least not as a mature artist. He was an extremely prolific painter and everything I have seen looked to me as if it was done in on e shot. The upside of that is that he designed a lot of paintings and got good at that part of the puzzle. He also had LOTS of inventory which he sold like crazy at reasonable prices. The downside is that his oeuvre was extremely uneven. Emile made some really fine paintings, when he was good he was great. However there are a lot of Gruppes out there that are well.... a little undercooked.

A lot of Gruppes are in the 25 by 30 size range.He was a plein air painter even using the tightest definition. He was a plein air painter to a greater extent than almost any other artist I can think of. I don't think he reworked stuff in the studio at all.

One of the ways he made so many pictures was to return over and over to the same scene. The Baptist church in Rockport or some of the dock scenes in Gloucester were used for subject matter over and over, with varying results. On this page are more paintings of the same stand of birches as the one I posted the other night (that's shown below) Above is a grouping that I believe is probably the same place.

I was also asked whether Gruppe "keyed" the whole painting to the bases of those trees. And I think he probably did. The contrast there and the importance off those areas lead me to believe that he probably started there and used that area as his "punchline" In each of these paintings it seems as if that area is real important.

Here is another picture of what I believe to be the same birches from the other side. This time it's a gray day. But there is again the same emphasis on the bases of the birches and the contrast in value and or color temperature there.

Color temperature usage in an Emile Gruppe painting

Emile Gruppe, probably painted along the Lamoille river in Jefforsonville, Vermont

There are a number of things that almost all workshop students need help understanding. A common one is color temperature. This One can take some work to understand! Their paintings are frequently all of a neutral temperature. That is, they are not selectively making some colors warm and others cool. They often record the hues in front of them as best as they can, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Often they get the value correct (or nearly so), but seldom do they authoritatively state the temperature of the note.

The Gruppe above is a good example of an artist effectively managing his warms and cools. Gruppe has "pushed" the color in this picture. One of the ways he has done this is to characterize the temperature of his various colors. Look at the warm light in the shadows of those birches, and in some passages like the lower parts of the right hand tree has thrown a cool (pthalo) blue in there. He gets a lot of color variety doing that and the painting looks fresh and exciting.

At the top of the painting the cool blue mountains act as a counter point to the warm birches. We see the birches strongly relieved by both the value and the color temperature of those mountains. That strong contrast is dynamic and makes a 'sweet spot" that catches a our eye. He no doubt saw this to some extent, but most certainly he installed most of it, knowing that it would look good. Because......

YOU CANNOT OBSERVE FINE COLOR INTO A PAINTING, IT MUST BE INSTALLED!

Just like design, color that is intentional and deliberate will trump dutifully recorded color. The artist is a poet, not a journalist, or worse an accountant.

Outside in warm light, you can expect the lights to be warm and the shadows cool, with hot reflected lights. If the light is cool ( or you choose to make it that way to suit your artistic purpose) you can expect the lights to be cool and the shadows warm.

Gruppe has chosen to do it both ways in this picture. He may have been inspired by the blue of the sky bouncing into the shadows from the sky itself or perhaps the river. He has played that up to get zing into his color. That made the pictures color more exciting.

Several places in this picture Gruppe has deliberately relieved an object of one color temperature against another of a radically different color temperature.

Above is a detail from the Gruppe that shows him playing this game. At A he has placed the cool shadow of the birch against a hot note of the limpid and Oncorhunchus mykiss infested waters.
At B The cool note of the water meets a warm streak of light defining the edge of the tree. And at C the cool shadow is again strongly contrasted with the hot note in the water. Notice how Gruppe has also painted the thin branches at the top of the painting hot against the cool color of the sky.

Value contrast can give "punch" to a painting, but playing your warms and cools against one another can too. Oh -do- dah- day!

Minimalist color in a Seago

© The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery www.portlandgallery.com


My friend Renee just posted a bunch of Seago paintings I don't guess I can link to a Facebook page because of the friend thing. I grabbed one, almost at random to write about. It is such a fine one!

Seagos are minimalist, they are from the same time as the stripped down architecture that followed the second world war. They are still traditional painting but they are spare, reduced and simplified to the essentials. They are a different possible take on minimalism. Tonight I will talk about his minimalist color.

Seagos color is reduced in this painting to almost black and white, the other colors are dull and earth colors. He uses very little chroma in any color. They are all desaturated. But they are beautiful in their subtle restraint. He used a simple palette that had earth colors and a chrome yellow (rather like a weak cadmium yellow) vermilion (a warm red somewhat like cadmium red but less strident, it is the color in the lips and cheeks of old portraits ) and viridian He has varied his color temperatures to make them interesting. Good color is not the number of different colors you can use, or their brightness or assertiveness. It is an intelligent arrangement founded on the way those colors relate to one another. The best pianist isn't necessarily the one who can pound the loudest.

Notice the cool color in the light of the house in the middle, the shadow under its eaves contrasts with that by it's warmth. All over this painting dull colors are enlivened by the play of warm and cool hues.

On the first floor of that building are two shops, one red and the other green. They are the most "colored"notes in the entire painting. In most paintings they would look dull and muddy. But every color looks the way it does only in the context of the other colors around it. These reds and greens are surrounded by grays and blacks. Dull as these two shop front notes are, they are gay in comparison to their surroundings. Probably each is partially knocked down by the admixture of the other. They fit together perfectly because grave as they are, the relate to one another.To their right is a third shop, or just a wall, that is made from a pattern of both notes from the other two. There is a progression from a dull red to a dull green to a combination of the two together. That didn't just happen, because as I have said before;

NOTHING GOOD GETS INTO A PICTURE BY ACCIDENT!

Seago made that happen, he decided to make that intelligent and beautiful arrangement because the progression across those tones would be appealing. Most of the viewers would know they liked that part of the painting but not know why. They didn't have to know why for it to work on them, any more than they would have to know what key a tune is in to like hearing it. But the musician who wrote the tune knew and chose that key to make his song "work".

Seago repeats the dull red in that Zamboni ( or whatever that shape is) parked on the sidewalk at the right. The buildings roof has those colors laced into it also. The cool notes in the light struck building at the center contain the green, and the building on the left s a gray containing the red note.The sky has the same dull red dull green pattern hidden there too.

The picture is a black and white warp into which is woven a weft of dull red and green. This is completely arbitrary, he installed those colors. I expect there were some colors actually there that inspired his caprice, but the color in this painting is decorative and not observed. He has made an arrangement of very quiet subtle colors that set one another off, embedded in a field of gray and black.

I think I could probably write more about minimalism in Segos work in my next post because it is in his shapes and design too.

WHEN I GET SCARED

Emile Gruppe

I am typing away in a MacDonalds, The hurricane didn't much any damage here, lots of rain, a little high wind. I still have power, many people around here don't. But I did lose the internet.
I am writing a post on the picture above, if the internet is willing I should be able to get it out tomorrow.

I should throw something of value out here tonight. Lets try this;

WHEN I GET SCARED I DROP BACK TO A THREE COLOR PALETTE.

As you all have seen my palette in previous posts, I won't list my colors, but I have both chromatic and earth colors on my palette. I am not requires to use every color on the palette though. Embedded within my palette are several smaller three color palettes. For instance I could use cadmium yellow, cobalt blue and cadmium vermilion. Often when I decide to use just three pigments I move them in front of the other pigments to remind myself I am only using these three.

When I am floored on how to paint something, at least its color. I will simplify the problem by only using three colors. It makes a smaller problem because there are few choices to make and the notes I do make are easily repeatable. So When I am stuck or just "getting killed" out there. I switch down to a smaller palette.

Gotta go the Macdonalds is closing. More soon.

Homeopathic whites

Here I am. I have dropped back the schedule on writing the blog to every other day or even every third day for a while. I have so much unfinished work in my studio. Those of you with various "feed" will get the blogs when I publish them and you who find me through Facebook will get the link on your home page when I publish. This is not a symptom of the blog ending. I have a lot more to write about. I keep a sort of flow chart so that when an idea for a post occurs to me I write it down, with little arrows like a genealogical tree showing how a series of posts might follow.

I am going to write about Homeopathy a little bit, not because of the practice itself, although I will tell you a little of that as an aside, but because I am going to describe a procedure in painting by comparison .

Homeopathy is an alternative medical philosophy invented by Samuel Hahnemann in 1796. Hahnemann was writing in an era when medicine was primitive, ineffectual and often painful and dangerous. He expounded a theory of "similars". That is, he believed that a very small dose of a substance that would give you a symptom, was useful for treating someone who had that same symptom. So if you had a problem with skin rashes he might have given you something that would cause skin rashes, like Poison Ivy. Because the remedies often contained noxious. or poisonous ingredients Hahnemann diluted them. In fact he believed that the more diluted they were, they more efficacious they would be. He would put a sprinkling of an ingredient, like salt or arsenic into a beaker of water. Then he would take a tiny eyedropper from that and dilute it with another entire beaker of water. From that beaker he would take another eyedropperful and add it to third beaker, and so on. Often the mixtures made contained no molecules of the original active ingredient actually present in the final remedy.

Homeopathy is discredited today although there are homeopathic remedies on the market. ZiCam for colds is a well known one, and there are people who compound and sell homeopathic remedies. Many of the products available today that say they are homeopathic, are not actually created by this dilution system. They just use the word to mean all natural, and harmless, selling their products to people who are unfamiliar with the actual definition of what a homeopathic remedy is.

The reason I brought all of this up is to talk about mixing paint on the palette though. My long suffering pink camera seems to have died, so I shot the following pictures with my cell phone. They aren't very good, but you should be able to see what I am up to.

I sometimes paint passages in extremely high values, notes that are very close to white but carry a smidgen of a color.This is useful in skies or the sides of boats in sunlight etc. I can mix up a pile of color to paint these passages this way, like a homeopath. I make a very high key (light) note using a lot of white and a pigment. In the picture below I used cadmium yellow.

Then I take a smidgen (like an eyedropperful) of that mixture and throw it into a new pile of white. That is shown below.


Often I will do this to three or so different pigments, with white, creating three piles that are very close to white but contain a little red or blue or yellow. With those three piles I can work in an extremely high value in broken color. I can use each of those different tints to express the turning of a form in bright sunlight.

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SNOWCAMP

Snowcamp I is full. I have a few spaces left in Snowcamp II if you want one now would probably be the time to sign up. If there is sufficient interest I may be able to add a third session I am not sure. The link is over there on the right in my sidebar.

A question about three color palettes

baby animal

Here is a a letter from a reader;

Hey Stape -

After years of using a palette full of colors, I am going the limited route. I have experimented with a variety of triads and wondered if there are triads that you find to be most "harmonious," for lack of a better word. I have used the Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Yellow triad and am now playing around with Alizarin, Pthalo Blue, and Cadmium Yellow Light. I enjoy mixing greens and would love your advice on that issue as well. As for my darks (particularly dark space) I use a mixture of Sap and Alizarin - in addition to the triad.

Thank you for your gracious and generous help!...........................Rodney Achromatopsia

Rod;
There are a lot of three color palettes, If I had to choose just one it would be Cadmium yellow light, alizarin permanent (quinacridone) and cobalt blue. Painting in a three color palette is a great way to develop your color technical skills. It also means you are dragging less stuff around with you. Matching a new note to one already on the canvas is easy too, because there are only a few color choices you can make. You will get great color harmony, but you lose some things as well.

I have also painted with earth color three color palettes. You don't hear much about those, but I have had some good days working in those. An example of that would be yellow ocher, ivory black and an earth red.

Mixing greens would seem pretty obvious as there are so few choices you can make. Yellow plus your blue, usually doctored up with your red.You may not be able to get anywhere near the actual greens in front of you, but that matters less than you might think, the harmony of your colors will make the greens seem correct,USUALLY.

I would suggest caution with adding that sap green and alizarin mixture to get your darks, after all, the beauty of the three color palette is the color harmony it automatically installs in your painting adding that sap green will probably compromise that. Sap green used to be made with buckthorn berries, today it is a hue, and can be almost any shade of yellow green, and is generally mad with pthalo. Unless you already have pthalo in your palette, I think that is a recipe for disharmony.

Working in a three color palette is excellent for learning to mix up your colors chromatically and as I mentioned before gives great color harmony. But it also brings some problems.They are;

• Unless you are very careful you will end up with a lot of pictures that are the same color. You want to watch that if you are doing a show.
  
• When I am working on a larger palette I have the ability to use different pigments to paint my lights than I use to paint my shadows, that's handy. If you are on a three color palette you are going to paint the light and the shadow with the same colors. For instance, if I am painting a red barn with a full palette I can paint the lights with cad red and the shadows with alizarin, if I am using a three color palette I am going to paint my lights with cad red and my shadows with cad red plus my blue or my yellow, but the same red note must appear in both.
  
• I have far better control of my color temperature if I have a warm and a cool version of each hue.
• A famous palette called the Zorn palette, after an artist who probably didn't use it, substitutes Ivory black for the blue.
• I think a cool red is best if you only have one, rather than a hot red like the cadmium red light, unless you are Zornizing, in which case I suggest what ever red is closest to vermilion in color that you can find. I am painting figures one night a week and doing that with gold ocher, vermilion ( a hue, made by RGH), and ivory black. Real vermilion is too poisonous and the hue I am using works pretty well.
  

"Licking" and divisionist color

Here, let me show you something I talked about in snowcamp. Above are three notes of roughly equal value, one is yellow, the next red and the last blue ( barely, in this photo, but take my word for it). They are all mixed down with a lot of white. I am going to lay them loosely on top of one another and make a patch of broken, or divisionist color. Like so..........

The resulting patch of color has the three notes placed discreetly and separately. When we look at it, there is opalescence, or vibration. Vibratory color is much more alive then a simple flat note of paint laid like a housepainters brush stroke. I use vibratory color a lot in my painting because it enlivens passages. It is particularly useful in skies and snow, but entire passages and entire paintings can be made of vibratory color. This simple little effect is one of the roots of impressionist technique.

Nature is complex and the vibratory effect confuses the eye slightly and that recalls the complexity of nature as we see it, better than a flat color note would. There are other ways to do this, for instance, different shades of the same hue laid over one another in the same value.

Here I have divided the pile into two sections with my knife. To the right of that line I "licked" the paint until it was all blended together. It goes flat then. It is the color of pewter, dead. In order to work, the notes have to be separate from one another, discrete.

This is one reason that the old time painters cautioned so strongly against "licking". Licking is brushing repeatedly at your paint like a cat might lick it's fur. It muddies your color and wastes your time. Learn to put a note down and pull your brush away. The more times your brush hits a note, the weaker it gets. You cannot worry the paint on your canvas into a picture.

Innominate colors 2

Here is the mixing of innominate colors I described to you last night. I described the colors that re not identifiable with a name like red, blue violet or green as innominate. That is, they have no names. I generally mix them from three primaries. I could build them from earth colors or black plus some chromatic colors, but this is the basic way I do it. The three colors above are Sennelier red, cadmium yellow and cobalt blue.

Here I have mixed them roughly together. I don't want to mix them to much as I want variations in the colors that I can pull from this pile. I can get a whole lot of different and varied notes by using different parts of the pile, one side gives me redder notes another yellower etc.

Innominate colors

Above is a hip bone, called the "innominate bone by some anatomists. Innominate means "without a name". So it is the bone that has no name.

There are colors that have no names. An innominate color is a color that isn't identifiable as red or yellow or blue, you wouldn't call it green or purple, it is a gray but it does have some color to it. Who knows what to call it?

Nature outdoors is full of innominate colors. They make your other clearer colors sing. Without them your picture has no color variety. Just as you need darks to make your lights seem bright, you need innominate colors to make your purer colors sing.

ALL COLOR IS NO COLOR!

Below is a Monet of Venice. I have drawn some crude arrows on the painting pointing out some innominate colors. I don't believe Monet made those notes using black or earth colors, they are a mixture formed from all three of his primaries.

image from artrenewal.org

When I am painting outdoors I often mix my innominate colors this way. I put a spot of my red, a spot of cadmium yellow and a spot of blue next to one another on my palette. Then I pull the middle of them together with my brush, giving me an innominate color. I can then make redder, yellower or bluer inominate colors from my pile. You could say it was a mud color, and I suppose it is, but I can hit a lot of the colors I see before me in nature out of variations pulled from this pile.

Sargent's tonal "themes"

images from artrenewal.org

I have written about tonalism before. There is a search box up at the upper left if you want to find thgose. Sargent uses some tonalist ideas in a number of his paintings. Here are a few examples.
Above in the Jardin Du Luxemburg painting, Sargent has suffused the whole scene in a cool blue pearlescence. He is putting the picture into a unifying color theme. All of the colors except for a few red accents are variations on a color theme. This soft shade permeates the entire picture and is mixed into almost every note.

Lady Agnew above also has a tonal "drone" going on. That cool blue and soft blush pink is everywhere on the canvas. The trick to getting a tonalist effect is often as simple as suppressing its complement. That is if you want to paint a tonalist color based on yellow, you suppress it's opposite, violet. The color unity of the painting benefits enormously. This is the opposite idea of impressionist color in a way. The color is "corralled" into a narrow range, rather than observed in its actuality. Sometimes a plein air painting in accurate color can look like a mosaic of unrelated colors.

Here is another example, that glowing rose madder color is sneaking into just about everywhere in this painting. Sargent is "smuggling" red.