Table of Contents
- Research Chevreul
- Exercises
- Bibliography
Research: Chevreul
I seem to like to make things hard for myself. For this course I had gone over to Abebooks ( a great online meta-retailer for used books ) and sourced many of the texts referenced as required/suggested reading. So, naturally, in this project I looked up Chevreul’s “The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, and their appliations to the Arts” (English version by Charles Martel). As an object it is wonderful: dark blue fabric cover, suffering from its many years of existence and use. Pages yellowed from the acids in the paper. It feels fragile. I feel like my gaze could tear its pages. Well, this object was printed in 1855, so I figure that makes sense.
The first part of the book takes me back to highschool physics class, and the units on Optics. The prism, and splitting white light. The additive effect of colours in light, versus subtractive of pigments. Then we leap over to highschool art classes, and the quick discussion of the complements (red-green, yellow-purple, blue-orange, indigo-yellow/orange — yes, indigo is specifically called out in the book).
The first main concept that Chevreul dives into is what he calls ‘simultaneous contrast of tones’. Essentially, how our brains interpret colours as lighter or darker based on the contrast to items nearby. I encounter this one frequently when I’m mixing colours on my palette, and find a mix to be (in appearance) substantially darker or lighter once on the canvas, versus where it was on my palette. It is going to take me a while to go through this work, but it looks interesting and has a number of practical exercises (which I suspect I will end up doing as part of this course, if I look ahead in the syllabus).
Chevreul’s work on colour influenced the Impressionists, and those that came after. In particular, the Neo-Impressionists such as Seurat and Signac seem to be heavily leveraging the understanding of colour and light. I’ve always been fascinated by pointillism, though I definitely do not have the patience. My wrists hurt just thinking about how to accomplish what Signac has in the painting above.
But the effect is amazing. Stand back, and the colours mix and blend. It is remarkable.
I’m reminded of Julie Desmarais, whose work I encountered at the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair in July. The above image doesn’t do it justice, but her work is done mostly with the tiniest brush strokes. Given the size of her works, it must take incredible amounts of time. But the results are stunning: the light just flows out of the painting. Of course, it is plain that the work is not quite like Seurat or Signac, but I think there is definitely and echo here.
Henri-Edmond Cross
Cross came up on my twitter feeds, and I knew I had to spend some time looking at his work. So many of his pieces feel like they are just on the edge of abstract, and yet so physical. I can see the water sparkling in The Iles d’Or.
In The farm, evening the trees are fanciful. I’m reminded of Jean Giraud’s forms (obviously much much later). If I “stand back” I see watercolour washes here, yet I know this is rendered via dots of oil paint. Magical.
Exercise 1: Achromatic Scales
I can’t say that mixing grey sounded like a very fun exercise, but I definitely got into it. I decided that I was going to only use a palette knife. This would help me keep a relatively uniform look, but also help me practice the amount of weight to use with the knife.
There is a lot going on the above:
White to Black, Black to White
There are two scales at the top. With the top one I started with white, then progressively added black. The second is the reverse: I started with black and then added white.
Observations:
- Adding small amount of black to white makes a large difference to the white. But, then, it took fairly large amounts of black to shift the colour darker. Towards the end I noticed I kept running out of paint, and needed to add both white and black to rebuild the paint pile.
- The second scale went in reverse. Here adding white changed the colour quite a lot until we reached around 2/3rds of the way along. Then I kept having to remove half the pile of paint and set it aside, and then add more white, in order to drive the colour down. I ended up with a lot of excess paint in this one.
- The third (first short) scale. The first tone is blend of the remaining paint pile from the 2nd scale. I then added black to see if I could find a middle ground between the two. I think I was a bit too dark.
- The fourth scale started with the same tone as above. Then I mixed some of the 3rd’s midtone, to get to a middle ground. If that makes any sense — it was a bit disordered. Here, I think I got to a reasonably balanced 4 tone scale. However adding white to the left makes me think I need a further tone between.
- Pigment-wise, titanium white seems to be a stronger pigment than ivory black.
- I’m not good at balancing the gradient. The light sides is short compared to darks.
Impasto
I had a good chunk of left over paint. I knew I was going to remix my midtone for the further exercises — I want to practice mixing — so I decided to mess with materials.
Marble Dust
With the remainder of the paint I added additional linseed, and some marble dust. The marble dust comes from my pastel making materials (link: drawing 1). Just like with pastels, the marble dust doesn’t have much in the way of tinting power.
It made the paint stiff, and yet soft. I was reminded of meringue. It will be interesting to see how the texture changes as the linseed cures.
Cold Wax
Following the marble dust, I tried adding black to some cold wax medium. I was expecting the wax to alter the colour significantly, due to its translucence, but with the Ivory black it didn’t change things significantly.
Instead of of soft peaks, though, the wax appears to be able to hold sharp edges. It also has gone quite matte.
I wonder if I can burnish the wax, once it cures?
Fascinating substance.
Exercise 2: Primary and secondary colour mixing
Pulling out all my oil paints, I arranged them roughly in a wheel. Over the last couple years, I’ve been picking up tubes here and there as I’ve tried to understand this medium. I recognize I probably need few of these, but if I’m to understand colour I need to at least understand the options.
Starting with yellows, then reds, blues and finally greens, I put small daubs on my palette and went to work attempting to build coherent colour relationships.
There is a lot going on here, on the left, so I labelled the areas. First off, yes the colour dots are small. By using the palette knife I could keep things contained, and if there are combinations I want to work larger with I can do the mixes again. But this is becoming something of a map for me: pointing me in directions with the colour choices.
Most everything is applied with a palette knife, except for a few wider spots where I either started with a brush.
- The top line are all my paints as I laid them out, without considering their fine grain relationships. They are, in order (all Gamblin unless otherwise noted):
- Cadmium chartreuse, cadmium lemon, hansa yellow light, cadmium yellow light, indian yellow, transparent earth orange, lemon ochre (rublev), yellow ochre, yellow ochre(kama), ercolano red ochre (rublev), burnt sienna, indian red, french red ochre (rublev), alizarin crimson, cadmium red medium, napthol red, quinacridone magenta, quinacridone violet, dioxazine purple, purple ochre (rublev), Payne’s grey, pthalo blue, cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, prussian blue, ceurlean blue, manganese blue hue, cobalt teal, pthalo turquoise, verona green earth (rublev), pthalo emerald, italian green umber (rublev), raw umber, raw umber(winsor & newton), viridan, sap green, permanent green light
- Working through the earth tones and ‘neutral’ versions of the intense colours. Trying to figure out a hierarchy of more/less neutral alongside where on the colour wheel.
- My collection of ‘intense’ colours. All the neutralized versions are moved above this line.
- Trying to decide which yellow I wanted to work with, with my identified red. The red is a mix of cadmium red medium, and alizarin crimson. the yellows are cadmium lemon and cadmium yellow light. I chose cadmium yellow light.
- Scale from cadmium yellow to my mixed red.
- I’m aware of the CMY colour palette, so this is a scale from yellow to quinacridone magenta. They feel roughly similar to 5, though 5 is warmer. I also jumped pretty far from yellow to orange in the first step.
- I tried mixing a blue between Cobalt Blue and Cobalt Teal. This I then mixed against my red mix. These blues struck me as the most intense, so I tried to blend them as Cobalt Blue struck me as ‘warm’ and I couldn’t pin down teal as red or yellow leaning. (15 is where I’m trying to select my intense blue, 16 is where I’m testing initial mixes of blue and teal vs my red mix and quin magenta).
- Again going back to CMY palettes, here is cobalt teal and quin magenta. I quite like these colours.
- Cad yellow light vs blue mix. All those camouflage colours.
- Cad yellow light vs cobalt teal. There are some tropical greens in here. I wonder what the difference would be, here, if I used cad lemon or cad chartreuse. I should try this.
- Blue to red scale, attempting to control for value. Taking a look at the greyscale image to the (below), I was reasonably good until I got to the middle. Need to do this more, as I really can’t see value so well with colour.
- Similar with cadmium yellow light to blue (with white to reduce value). I think I did fairly well matching the blue, but the middle went darker. Such an interesting result.
- More value-control scales I need to do: yellow-red, yellow-quin magenta, blue-quick magenta.
- 5 already looked pretty good, and putting it into greyscale in my image editor confirms that. The red is dark, but the rest seems reasonably well connected. I still should re-do, with intention.
- 10 also looks very good, though I shouldn’t be surprised as I’m starting with two pure colours with very light value. Again, I should repeat with intention.
- I find it fascinating how the colours darken in value in the middle, despite how light some of the starting values are.
- I took the left over piles of paint from my activities above, and mixed them together. These were the resulting colours. Some are quite interesting.
Side Track: Building a shadow box for still life painting
Reading ahead, as I was working through earlier exercises, I began gathering materials for making a still life shadow box. I was thinking how difficult it was to setup the lighting for the chiaroscuro exercise, and knew I’d need something similar again.
I’ve cut two holes on the left, so I can attach a light. I debated whether I should create a number of such holes, so I had options for lighting. I decided to minimize the number, this time through. I can always create another such box — they are cheap to make.
Ideas
Ideas come at strange times. I’m assembling this box, and my mind is naturally drawn to what can be done with still-life. With matte black armature I could suspend objects in the still life. Like a tea-cup tilted as if held and being sipped from. Paint in the fingers — just enough to be seen — holding the cup’s handle. Arise moments of eyebrow, cheekbone and nose out of the gloom of the background shadows. People intervening into the still life, yet keep the focus on the objects. Remain stilled.
Something to consider and maybe attempt.
Exercise: Broken or tertiary colours
I hope I interpreted this exercise correct. I’ve been getting the sensation that the text uses ‘scale’ in an almost musical sense. Am I supposed to be creating octaves of colour? I haven’t been. I’m working through trying to understand how the quantity of pigment shifts the colour. I’m far away from having this handled, but I’m getting more comfortable, definitely.
My first mix was the orange-red vs green-blue. I mixed the colours myself (was I suppose to choose tube paint?). The mixes made some interesting neutralized purples. I was expecting more grey, to be honest, which makes me think my starting colours weren’t tilted far enough towards yellow. I was expecting the yellow in the mix to kill the purple (complementary colours) in a strong fashion.
That said, when mixed with white these colours started reminding me of skin tones. I’m going to keep track of these mixes. I can use them later, and also practice more.
I am very good at mixing mud, normally. Dead colours, or weird plastic tones. This is an exercise I’m going to continue with, in general, as I navigate towards more comfort and effectiveness with colour. It seems like a generally effective practice exercise.
I’m well familiar with the Zorn palette (ivory black, cad red, yellow ochre, white) and the various effects that can be achieved with it. Notably, it is often presented in grids of mixes. I wonder if I should borrow these ‘grids’ and start building up a collection of grids based on the tubes I have. It would take forever, but might be worthwhile. Also, note to self: write up some research on Anders Zorn and maybe contrast against John Singer Sargent
Exercise: Complementary colours
There are times that you know something intellectually, but then experience it in process. Today it was there are no pure primary colour pigments (or none that I have). I was working through colour wheels, with different choices for primaries.
In this particular photo, one wheel was Quin. Magenta, Cobalt Teal, and Cad Lemon. The other I had mixed ‘primaries’: Quin Magenta+Napthol Red, Cobalt Blue + Pthalo Blue, and Cad Lemon.
This two colour wheels produced really different results. Notably, where colours began neutralizing. With the Cobalt Teal wheel (lower) the arc from magenta, through cad lemon, and cobalt teal looks quite good. I’m not seeing any neutralization there. But magenta to cobalt teal via purple I can see neutrals happening.
In the mixed primaries wheel (top) the greens are neutralized, but the purples look a bit better.
These photograph terribly, of course.
Also, here, you can see me experimenting with mixing complements together (blue/orange) and comparing them side by side. I quite like the browns these create.
Other observations? I make too big a jump between yellow and yellow-orange. I could shift the yellow-orange I mixed probably to the ‘orange’ spot and remix the intervening steps.
Bibliography
1 Chevreul, M. E. (1855) The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours. (2nd ed.) (s.l.): Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.
2 Roque, G. (1996) ‘Chevreul and Impressionism: A Reappraisal’ In: The Art Bulletin 78 (1) pp.27–39.
3 PAUL SIGNAC | LE PIN DE BERTAUD | Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale | (s.d.) At: https://www.sothebys.com/buy/12c615e8-17c8-4c34-98f0-bff29d7560f8/lots/6449f33c-c854-4270-bd8a-2fb5d0f086ac (Accessed 18/08/2022).
4 Pointillism Art Movement And Its Most Inspiring Artists (s.d.) At: https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/pointillism-dotted-art (Accessed 14/10/2022).