The Journey Into Color, Pt. 2

In 1981, a good friend of mine (and a fine artist) suggested a beginner's palette by which I might venture into oil painting. My notes from his suggestions list these colors:

• Permalba white
• Ivory black
• Raw umber
• Ultramarine blue
• Yellow ochre
• Burnt sienna
• Burnt umber
• Cadmium red light

My notes also indicate that later I was to have added cadmium orange, and to ivory black I might eventually have added blue or burnt umber for organic varieties. I completed the monochrome painting of a landscape, and because he suggested that I might use white, black, and raw umber in the process, I learned that black in oils is not the absence of color; that I was really painting with three colors, and that the only way to keep the painting monochrome was to mix equal portions of black and raw umber before using white to dilute the saturation in order to achieve a particular location on the tonal scale in which the painting was being rendered.

For reasons I no longer recall, the tuition I was to have received in oil painting lasted only briefly, and I came away with the mistaken impression that I should have been able to mix every color I might ever need from the suggested palette. This misunderstanding led to a great deal more mixing of paints and great deal more disappointment than might have otherwise been the case. Nevertheless, as far as painting was concerned, I still had a goodly number of years of “day jobs” to attend to, instead of working full-time as a studio artist. Consequently, the main focus of my artwork continued to be monochrome pencil drawings and eventually monochrome lithograph miniatures.

On weekends, holidays, and time off from paid employment I persevered as best I could on what is, for every artist, essentially an intensely personal adventure into color. My initial approach to color involved creating elaborate color wheels from the hues from that beginner's palette. I toned hardboard grounds and made wheels of color dots from the oil paints, recording the results of my mixing by a series of paint dots, and even using dot size to indicate the relative amounts of hues involved in the result. The dots were arranged in sequences to record stages in the process of mixing, and sometimes even showed relationships in the origin of resulting hues.

I did not realize that color would eventually become a matter of looking at something and then feeling my way along through the process of representing it. I long ago stopped the color-wheel exercises, but I think the practice helped me develop an awareness of which oil paints might be required in achieving a particular hue. For me, the whole process has become much like seasoning food: I don't follow recipes or formulas, I simply look, embark, and keep on looking and following hunches along the way.

I don't try to save paint either by mixing sparingly or by attempting to store paint left over from a successful session. I start each session with fresh paint and a clean palette, and I clean up thoroughly at the end of every session. It isn't paint that painting and color are all about, but the ability to believe that next time you step up to the easel you can do whatever needs to be done, again.

I have also discovered that, strictly speaking, I'm not trying to copy what I see; instead, I attempt to replicate what I see as well as to manipulate the replica in order to achieve a desired emotional response. Color is not just true to life in the sense of being true to what one sees, but true to what one feels and knows. It is this latter tenet that often requires the use or manipulation of color apart from mere sight. After all, vision is not merely seeing, but looking. The latter is a directed activity for which the eyes are among the tools required.

Initially, I tried to mix the precise colors I needed, the idea being that all of the mixing occurred on the the palette, but as the years have progressed the mixing of color has migrated from the palette to the painting. I still do some mixing on the palette, but not as rigidly as before, and the mixing of color is also fragmented across alla prima application as well as translucent glazes.

Today, my palette (in alphabetical order) consists of:

• Burnt sienna
• Cadmium red light
• Cadmium yellow light
• Chromium oxide green
• Cinnabar green light
• Cobalt blue deep
• Cobalt blue ultramarine
• Green earth
• Olive green
• Payne’s grey
• Permalba white
• Phthalocyanine green
• Quinacridone violet
• Raw sienna
• Raw umber
• Scarlet
• Ultramarine blue
• Yellow ochre

The workhorse colors on this palette include:
Burnt sienna
Cadmium yellow light
Chromium oxide green
Cinnabar green light
Olive green
Payne’s grey
Permalba white
Quinacridone violet
Raw umber
Scarlet
Ultramarine blue
Yellow ochre
Some of the hues are important in the way I glaze (such as quinacridone violet). Other hues listed are indispensable in alla prima.

In terms of the volume of paint used, I keep large tubes of Permalba White and raw umber on hand. The greens on this list are probably expendable for a beginning palette: I relied for years on mixing the greens I needed, and only purchased these greens as time-savers.

Some of the most notable differences between today's palette and the suggested palette with which I started include the absence of black, the addition of cadmium yellow light, and the addition of scarlet.

I stopped painting with black long ago because it kept pulling colors toward gray, and because I have come to see the dark regions in a painting, or in nature, as being as rich in color as lighter regions. (Shadows almost always involve quin – “quinacridone violet” is too much of a mouthful – the cobalts, the ultramarine, and raw umber.) In the “music” of my paintings, black was almost always off key, or flat.

I added cadmium yellow light because without it I simply had no sunshine in the yellow portion of the spectrum of my palette.

And scarlet was added because I needed a red that could sing bass as well as tenor. The mood of the color suited my own, and I have been painting with it for years without any evidence of an allergic reaction.

The journey into color—in addition to being intensely personal (perhaps because sight, and what we are inclined to look for, vary from person to person)—simply takes time. In my case, I would not trade the years spent in monochrome because I like to think the constraint served well to refine other sensibilities. Even if a particular skill or medium requires a great number of years, there are so many facets to the creation of fine art—so many sensibilities and skills to be developed—that there is generally something else on which to focus during what appears to be delay. Said more simply: It is possible to paint by learning techniques and formulas, but the real adventure begins just beyond them, where there are no words.