--- John Ruskin
“Do we see colour before shape; or do we see the two together? And is it possible to see a colour without realizing what its shape is?”
--- Lynton Lamb, Preparation For Painting
^Study of a Stand of Trees, Prospect Park, Brooklyn (July 2009)
^Study of a Storm Cloud, New Jersey (July 2009)
^Study of an Industrial Landscape, New Jersey (July 2009)
So last month I wrote that my paintings have been hampered lately by problems, that I was unsure how to navigate through some paintings I’ve wanted to start, and that I wasn’t “starting in the right place”.
These blog posts, no matter what date they show, are always a bit behind whatever is actually happening since I take my time writing them (going over them repeatedly, refining what I’ve written). And during the time I was writing last month’s post, I finished assembling a new color palette for my watercolor paintings. It may be the very solution I needed.
I’ve based my colors on those used by the eighteenth-century watercolorist John Robert Cozens (1752–1797). His reserved, quiet paintings have an incredible strength and simplicity which he achieved with a limited palette consisting of only eight colors, avoiding a primary yellow in favor of a yellow ochre. I’ve been mixing these eight colors and achieving muted, sophisticated results. I think they are beautiful. I’ve been working with only this small range of colors for the past few weeks and have been very happy to see all these subdued, quiet colors that seem visually sympathetic to my subject matter. By mixing two colors together I can achieve an additional twenty-eight colors and, by mixing three colors together, at least eighteen more on top of all that.
I assembled this palette after becoming frustrated and overwhelmed with the twenty-four colors I put together last year. I needed to scale things back and contain my reach a bit more. There can be a great ability to express oneself within seemingly narrow parameters. Ironically, the limitless can be limiting, if only because one benefits from a demarcated area to build in. Without boundaries, there is nothing to push against. A flat land with no sign posts or defined horizons in any direction would force the question “where am I?”
My palette for the foreseeable future will consist of:
- green earth (schmincke #516)
- burnt umber (schmincke #668)
- prussian blue (schmincke #492)
- ivory black (schmincke #780)
- bright yellow ochre (schmincke #655)
- burnt sienna (schmincke #661)
- indian red (schmincke #645)
- alizarine crimson (schmincke #353)
I cannot easily imagine doing without cobalt blue and may have to add it. Otherwise, this palette is enough to work with, but not too many to get lost in. I’ll be matching my egg temperas and oils with this palette in order to coordinate all my work.
Three small landscape studies using this new palette are posted above.
I take off for August every year, in true New York style --- see you in September!
