Painting Tonally; Blue Violet

Delta Par Temps Gris, 8.5 x 16 inches, oil on linen

Here is another tonalist landscape, this time in blue-violet. It's more or less a monochromatic picture, which suits me just fine when trying to convey the damp moodiness of the Sacramento delta in the colder seasons.

The basic structure of this painting is that the dark landmass, as it recedes into the distance, becomes systematically lighter and closer in color to the sky. That's it. That's all it is.

John Singer Sargent, Venice Par Temps Gris 1882 (?)

The title of my painting is a reference to one of my favorite Sargent sketches, Venice Par Temps Gris. It is a beautifully executed sketch of Venice, seen from somewhere near the Naval History Museum, I'd guess. You can see the Bell Tower (in San Marco Square) to the right, and Santa Maria della Salute in the distance. As the title suggests, it's a very gray painting, but it's far from monochromatic. (Click on the image to see a bigger jpeg with more accurate colors.)Unlike my "narrow slice of pie" painting, Mr. Sargent is working in the center of the color wheel, where everything is muted down but touches every hue. Look at the cool blues in the Santa Maria della Salute, the yellows in the sky, and the warm red violets in the foreground. Very subtle but distinct from one another, right? Simply gorgeous.

Notice, too, how much value range he has in the foreground, but the range diminishes systematically as we recede into the distance (compare the darks of the boats in the foreground, the bell tower in the middle distance and finally the dome of the Salute.

The biggest value contrast can be found in the foreground dark boats against the very light water, so that's where we expect to find the focal point (value contrast attracts a lot of attention) but he uses soft edges there so we don't linger there. The few saturated notes at the extreme foreground (together with sharp edges there) makes us go there instead.

If you isolated these saturated notes in the vendor cart (?) in the foreground, though, you'd see that it's not very saturated at all. It's just that everything else is even grayer. See, it's all relative.

I can stare at this painting all day, man. It's actually in a private collection so I doubt you can just go in and see the original, but it's sometimes included in big museum shows. I saw it at LACMA several years back when they did the Sargent and Italy exhibition. They published a beautiful catalogue which I highly recommend. It's one of my treasured books.

We'll talk more about working in the center of the pie soon~