color values

The most important thing that I learned in Jef Gunn’s Intermediate Painting class was to consider the value of colors. Value refers to light and dark, the lightest value 10 being white and the darkest 0 being black and a spectrum of grays between them. One usually hears values discussed in reference to black and white photography, see for example Ansel Adams’ zone system. Color is a made up of Hue, Value and Chroma, but generally when people talk about color they talk about hue, as in Red, Yellowish-Red, or Cool Red.

Many aspects of Munsell’s color system and color theory in general get excessively complicated, but remembering to consider the values of the colors I’m using in a painting has been become important to me. After having this revelation about value I reviewed some of my older paintings that I disliked. When putting the image into grayscale I noticed that many of my problematic areas occurred from having too many colors of a similar value in the painting or having colors of great disparity in value next to each color.

In other parts of this blog I refer to the fact that I try to have some modulation and rendering in the forms in my paintings, such that there is a light and shadow within the form (though not really a consistent light source for the entire painting) or light and dark informing the foreground and background of the painting. Now periodically I check photos of my paintings in grayscale to look for value disparities.

If I’m being vague or convoluted or just uninteresting, let me bring up a different example. My favorite artist for the last few years is Raimonds Staprans. Like most of the Bay Area artists that I like he was an abstract expressionist at the beginning of his career and transitioned into figure painting in the sixties. He has referred to himself as an abstract realist and that he only paints real objects as a means to play with color. While this might sound contradictory, what it means in a practical sense is that in a painting of a pear you can tell that it is a pear, but at the same time there are colors used to paint the pear that are not generally pearlike, teal, blue-violets, and pale oranges. Below I have one of Staprans’ paintings of a chair, the first in second in black and white, the second in color. In the b&w everything looks like its been rendered realistically (with exception to the post-modern/pentimento fifth leg), clear highlights, midtones, and shadows. In the color version instead of the highlight being a pale tan, the midtone being a ochre brown, and the shadow being a warm sienna as you might expect there are instead yellow-green highlights, gray green midtones, orange midtones, cool and warm blues as the shadows. One’s first perception of the color version could be that it’s wildly expressionistic, but the colors have been chosen very carefully to create realistic values.

ode

While working on the In the Shadows series I got frustrated enough with the drawbacks of direct painting to return to indirect painting, which is what I’ve concentrated on since. Do you notice a pattern of frustration and vacillation in my history? Anyway I’ve learned a lot of lessons in the process of vacillating from indirect and direct styles, such that I was able to solve a number of my issues and find methods that lessen my frustration for other aspects. So pretty much everything created in 2009 will reflect my new and improved indirect style. This does means slow paintings, and by slow I mean about 5 sq inches per hour – or to put it another way an area the size of this paragraph would take me two and half hours. I dislike that I can’t be as prolific as I would like, but I do like the finished quality of my paintings. The primary example of this at the moment is Ode.

Ode was my piece for Launchpad’s ‘4th Annual Love show’. As previously mentioned with the ‘Dreams’ show, I try to tailor pieces to a given show’s constraints, so I wasn’t going to just pick a random painting that had red and titled it Love. Although I did figure I’d include some pinks and pale violets in the palette, and also that I would base it on the bloom of a flower, with the overlapping petals creating the primary rhythms in the painting. Now I knew this was cheesy, but I figured by the time I was done with it no one would look at it and say ‘Look, a flower’, so it wouldn’t matter.

As I was drawing some sketches (with a pencil and not digitally for once) I was reminded of a painting I had seen, Esteban Vicente’s ‘Bridgehampton Rose’ seen at the bottom of this post. Vincente’s composition tends to fairly simple, more about subtle modulations of colors than about having complicated forms and rhythms. So I thought what would happen if I took his painting and overlayed my more complicated drawing. I thought making the painting a homage to Vicente could also further it as a piece about love. Of course this little narrative would be completely unapparent to the viewer, but it made me feel better.

I proceeded with this conception for about twenty hours before realizing that it wouldn’t work. I would either have to just recreate Vicente’s painting or do my own thing, I couldn’t manage any sort of melding. So I went back to the computer and did some more mock-ups combining one of my original sketches with a photo of the inprogress painting and of course throwing lots of other digital noise and layers at it as well. This really helped shift the direction of the painting. Now doing additional mock-ups and sketches in the middle of the paintings as a form of problem solving is a regular part of my practice.

Ode is probably my favorite piece of mine at the moment, although the photo of it doesn’t look fantastic. I’m pleased with the journey it took and the lessons I learned in the process. More importantly it looks good in person. It has the slightly inexplicable quality that can only be achieve with glazing, or at least this is the only way I know how to achieve it. Most particularly what I mean by this is that there are a lot of happy accidents of color. Now I love to mix color, I frequently spend an hour or more at the beginning of my day mixing colors for the day’s paintings. However, there are colors that I would never have picked and painted, which occurred because of semi-transparent layers of color stacked on top of each other with light refracting around between them.

time

I did the math this morning on how long I have until POS. At first five months sounds like a lot of time, as in who knows what I’ll be doing by then, or as in think of all the amazing work I’ll have completed by that time. So at first it seems expansive and exciting.

Then I started to break this down into days and hours. Then I factored in my other jobs (writing, bookselling) and the fact that I will be moving into a house in June. That after having moved into said new house I will have a commute in order to get to my new studio. Now it starts to get depressing.

I worked out a whole set of estimates based on all these variables and find that I will have somewhere between 450 and 900 hours available to me. The most likely number seems to 750. I paint around 6 square inches per hour, so that’s 4500 square inches. An 18 x 24 inch painting is 432 square inches, so I might be able to complete ten 18 x 24 inch paintings in this amount of time. And this is and is not a lot of paintings. Since I currently have mock-ups that I’m excited about for considerably more than 10 paintings, not to mention the paintings I’m currently halfway through that will cut into this time, this is not a lot of paintings.
And that I know the limit of what I can achieve in the next twenty five weeks, that’s pretty oppressive. And I can kid myself that I will somehow become superman and work ten and twelve hours days and never see my wife or sleep, I know that this is not true. And not only that, but my currently probably and possible estimate of 750 hours will steadily become my most optimistic estimate as reality and all its contingencies interfere.