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.

The Journey Into Color, Pt. I

When I was a boy, I spent hours gazing at desert sunsets that painted the deeping sky with vibrant and ever changing hues. I was spellbound by the symphony of feelings that welled up within me as I watched the way that turquoise gathers along the ribbon of infinity narrowly visible along the horizon. The soft colors there would darken into fantastical hues as the hem of the sun's bright robe disappeared beyond the lip of the world, taking with it the brilliant blue of day and the whiteness of its mountain clouds. I watched the mixing of colors in sunsets as nameless hues of fire mingled with the turquoise while the stealthy colors of the night crept across the twilight sky, gathering up the spent embers of gray clouds whose fire burned but for a moment, smoldered in ruddy pinks, and then, in but an instant, turned to ash.

As the seasons came and went I watched the colors of the mountains. Spring was a quick sunrise, summer a palette of warmth too intense to look at, autumn a sunset of yellows and reds, and winter a monochrome of stillness. I sensed the tempo in nature's use of color. There were volume and mass as well (much like the voices in a choir) in which some hues were spread by the broadest of brush strokes in painting the sky or the barren land or the forests, while other colors were painted sparingly with the fine tip of a sable brush for moments of intense emotion like flowers and aspen leaves and sunsets.

My childhood was plagued by asthma, which my parents were told derived from allergies. Extensive tests produced a breathtaking list of substances and consequent prohibitions. Strange as it may seem—and it sounded strange enough at the time—one doctor actually announced that in addition to everything else proscribing my childhood, I was supposedly allergic to the color red; not a particular kind of paint, mind you, but the hue itself.

Whether or not it is even possible for a person to be allergic to a color I cannot say, but there was enough potential difficulty with the array of substances involved in oil painting that my overwhelming desire to paint had to be confined to watercolor. However, without training of any kind, I treated the small color cakes that came my way as though they were oils or tempras, but without either satisfaction or success. The result was that I returned to the drawing set I had received as a birthday gift when I was four years old, and contented myself with graphite as a medium and a pencil for a brush. Attempts at colored pencils proved as disappointing as watercolor, and I settled into the task of trying to push a pencil as far as a pencil could go.

(Pencil drawing above, Chateau D'Aigle by Al R. Young, copyright 1983. All Rights Reserved.)

As the years unfolded, schooling, family, career, and other demands continued to make oil painting impractical. I had long since overcome the problem of allergies. Perhaps I outgrew them, but, in any case, I remember finally having to decide whether to survive or get on with life.

I did not know that traditional training in art typically began with the rendering of subjects in monochrome, in order to refine a person's skill in expressing form and tone. Yet as I look back on those years I have come to realize that time and time again I was faced with expressing a full range of thought and emotion in a very narrow spectrum; not to mention the narrowness of the finely sanded point of a no. 9 pencil. The practice gave me many opportunities to refine compositional skills as well as skill in representing forms and textures. And while I drew in monochrome, I lived and dreamed and thought and felt in color.

There also came a time many years ago when I read widely about color theory and perception. And although I may have learned much more than I realize, I learned that I did not want to know the names of colors, nor yet the math of formulas by which to organize them. The uses of such endeavors are legion and worthwhile, but I wanted, instead, to interact with color itself for purposes I could not articulate.

Color theory, at least in my experience, is helpful in creating paintings in much the same way that linguistics is helpful in terms of writing: If one needs to talk about language, linguistics is invaluable, but it doesn't necessarily make for better writing. Reading good writing, having something to say, and then working one's heart out in an effort to say it make for good writing. It has been that way for me and color. Absorbing color, particularly in nature, wanting to express something involving color, and then working my heart out in the attempt is what it comes down to.