Let's move onto colour for a while.
Having spent two full days on the weekend being taught by Jac, I have moved on from Grisailles into colour, for a while. Keeping the subject matter simple, no more crabs and pelvis, we now have apples and pomegranates!
First step, I had to think about the colours I needed to use in my palate. I won’t go into all of them in detail but one of my interesting discoveries was how the results of mixing are sometimes surprising. Take a look at this Transparent Red Earth and Venetian Red. Arguably I would suggest they are both ‘reddish’ brown.
It wasn’t until I mixed each with Phthalo blue in search of a Pomegranate purple/brown that I realised how each red behaved so differently. Highlighted by adding white. I look back at both reds and cannot believe that when taken through the same process they produce completely different colours and I find this really exciting.
Over the weekend whilst painting on two canvases we talked a lot about how colours and tones can be accentuated by what surrounds them. It’s funny because I think back about 10 years to my art studio in Wintec, New Zealand, where I was working on a suite of very pale paintings for my postgrad. I was constantly building up the whites in an effort to increase luminescence/brightness and then reached a point where I was just layering up more and more white with no drastic results. It was a moment of dawning when I finally realised its juxtaposition against darker tones that accentuate the light. I wrote this on my studio wall as a reminder.
So here I am at The Broadway Drawing School, a new dawning, when I realise that this same rule applies to many things in painting. Surround warm colour with cool colours and the warmth and coolness respectively will be accentuated. Put warm alongside warm and the results are less dramatic. You will only see which is warmer in relation to the other. I guess in life this juxtaposition applies to so many things. Stand Stephen Fry next to Tom Cruise to accentuate how short and tall they really are. I am struggling to find an idiot who is more noxious than Donald Trump to make him look less of an idiot, the closest I have come so far is Boris Johnson.
Anyway, I digress, I am still working on these paintings, the results, of which I will share with you later. It’s enough, for now, to say that I am considering the weight and fresh, coolness of the apple against the sun scorched, old pomegranate and how I can work with these differences in interplay between the objects and the background to accentuate this sensation in the painting.
Just before I go, Jac has put me onto Vincent Desidero talking about painting. I love this guy, he talks for three hours but in every minute there is a gem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K62SBQYQ53M
Until next week.....