Ooof! I did one of these challenges not long ago, but here goes! Day 1 of my mission to share something from my art, my studio, or my life for ten consecutive days, no explanation needed, and nominate someone to do the same. I nominate Penny Smith to share some of her beautiful artwork and carry on the call. The idea is to promote positivity and bring art into each other’s lives.
Here’s what’s on my easel at the moment — inching toward a dual portrait of my deceased brother-in-law Albert ‘Terp’ Ward, and his widow, Donna Garnett.
Double Portrait – 2d session
Initial drawing, using Catherine Kehoe’s method of building a web of intersecting lines until features emerge.
Painters have a wide variety of ‘tube colors’ to use in trying to achieve their desired hues. I’ve got 30 or 40 tubes of almost every color you can imagine, most of them untouched. For quite awhile, I’ve opted to limit the number of tubes I use, challenging myself to mix a broad variety of colors from a handful of basic hues. Painters call this a ‘limited palette’. It lightens the load of what you have to carry around with you and it helps give a unity of color to your painting. Nice attributes.
There’s no specified set of colors for a limited palette. In the past, I’ve typically used a ‘split primary’ group, which includes two versions of each primary color, plus white and maybe black. Each of the two selected primaries ‘bends’ toward a different adjacent secondary color. For instance, cadmium red tends toward orange (yellow), while alizarin crimson tends toward a purple (blue). Blues may include phtalo or cerulean blue which tend toward green (yellow) and ultramarine blue which leans toward purple (red). Split yellows might include cadmium yellow light, which tends green (yellow), and cadmium yellow, which tends toward orange/red.
If you want to mix a bright saturated orange using such a palette, you’d combine cadmium red and cadmium yellow, rather than alizarin red and/or cadmium yellow light – a combo that produces duller, less saturated oranges. And so on.
Here are a few of my paintings using the split primary palette.
Great Falls, Virginia. Oil on Linen. 20×16.
After the Wedding. Oil on Linen. SOLD
The End. Oil on Arches Huile Paper.
Patient Reader. Oil on Arches Huile Paper.
Two Shells, Three Pearls. Oil on ARches Huile Paper.
More recently, as a result of a zoom class with Bernie Dellario and a number of painting buddies, I’ve been working with an even MORE limited palette — just three primaries + white & a neutral earth red: Hansa yellow; pyrole red; ultramarine blue; transparent red oxide and Titanium white. What a challenge, but I think I’m getting the hang of mixing a broad range of colors from these meager starting points. Here are some recent paintings using this palette.
Breakfront. 6×8. Oil on Arches Huile paper
Goldfish from Above. 6×8. Oil on Arches Huile paper.
Cuban Flamenco Dancers. 10×8. Oil on Arches Huile paper.
On the Dock. 10×8. Oil on Arches Huile paper.
Oakleaf Hydrangea Leaf in Fall. 9×12. Oil on Arches Huile paper.
Here is the series of monochrome studies, all 6″ x 8″, done during the workshop with Bernie Dellario. Such a concentrated repetition of that exercise was useful in helping us spot values quickly.
I just finished an intensive four day workshop with outstanding local artist and teacher, Bernie Dellario. We were expected to make up a ‘color chart’ exploring the ways in which 3 tube colors (yellow, red & blue) + white could mix together to make virtually all the colors you might want.
We also painted ten 3-value monochrome paintings; ten 3-value color paintings; and a plein air painting which we then translated into a larger ‘studio painting’ (hopefully retaining the 3-value structure of the studies). Here’s my 16″ x 20″ studio painting of our cannas, through which we can enjoy our neighbor’s yard.
Cannas, Bamboo & Joe Pye?? Oil on linen panel. 16×20.
Here are the initial monochrome and color studies. Note that I included the bushy Joe Pye plant (?) in the black & white study; left it out of the color study; and then re-inserted it in the larger piece. Am glad I did – it’s now my favorite part of the painting!
It was Day 7 (and I was in a chatty mood): Hmmmm. Here’s a little still life I did day before yesterday. Dear cousins want oysters & pearls for their daughter’s new office. This was the first take; am now working on something bigger with a single oyster. Will share when it’s done.In the meantime, what are your thoughts on my current dilemmas: I set the oysters up on a white tablecloth (bottom photo), but the first cut was perhaps too monochrome & bland; so in the next pass I pushed the cloth toward lavender. I think it may now be ‘too too’. The background behind is probably too similar. Finally, the cloth, as painted, is wonky & needs to be reshaped & redone in any event. Ideas, y’all???
Shells and Pearls. Oil on Arches Huile Paper. 10 x 12.
I’m heartsick at the events of the last few days. Clearly there are more than enough bad folks to go around, but DAMN. Black folks have had a rope around their necks or a knee on their throats or a bullet in their backs for far too long. I heard wonderful Van Jones on TV last night, describing ‘the talk’ that each black parent must gave to their young children of a certain age, and these words stuck out: your skin is your sin. I had to make a quick painting this morning before heading into an art workshop filled with ole white women making fabric sculptures of themselves. How quaint.
Your Skin is Your Sin. Oil on Arches Huile Paper. 12 x 9.
For Day 6, I posted a more conventional figurative piece ~~ a young visitor who plopped herself down to wait til her mom finished visiting. She was such a sweet ‘Patient Reader’.
Patient Reader. Oil on Arches Huile Paper. 12 x 12.
New work to share! Here’s what’s on my easel, about to be signed. Sons Sam & Will, with their families, and Pat & I visited the Virginia side of Great Falls on the Potomac River last Christmas. I finally got around to making a studio painting of the magnificent scene!
I’m not great at landscapes, but I think I made real progress on this one!
Great Falls on the Potomac, Virginia. oil on linen. 20×16.
Day 5 brings another experiment off my beaten path. We were told in a workshop to draw a wandering line around our canvas without looking — and then turn it one way and another to see what it might suggest. We developed and painted expressive compositions out of our simple lines. I like how this turned out. I imagined the figure on the right as a mother and the other figures her sons, heading outside. She’s saying ‘Be Safe, My Sons!’ Now she’d probably be saying: ‘WEAR YOUR MASKS — and be EXTRA CAREFUL!!’
Be Safe, My Sons! Oil on Arches Huile Paper. 15 x 11.5
For Day 4, here’s another recent painting — based on an early morning drive south of Half Moon Bay in California around Christmas. I loved how the masses were knit together in form and color by the nestling mist — and the interesting, barely-there trees out on the cliff point. I’m still ‘California Dreamin’. With this coronavirus stuff, I don’t know when I’ll be able to fly out there again. Road trip???
California Dreaming. Oil on Linen. 16 x 12.
This is the second painting I entered in The Tonalist Society competition.
