Painting Tonally; Green

Winter Grazing, 11 x 14 inches, oil on linen

The problem with cows is that they tend to all face the same direction, even when they're not moving. If you're not careful, they can look like they were done with a rubber stamp.... hmmm may be that's not a bad idea....

Anyway, this is, obviously, a green painting. The blue-violet delta painting was a good example of diminishing value range as we go back in space and into denser atmosphere. This painting does that too, to an extent, but it's a better example of diminishing chroma. It's the same grass in the foreground as in the background, but we can't paint it the same color, if we hope to portray a sense of atmosphere. The farther we go back, the more the color is influenced by the atmosphere, which in this case is a very light cool gray. The grass, consequently, becomes less and less green and more and more cool gray. It's logical, systematic, and obvious.

I want to note another difference between this and the delta painting. They're both narrow-slice-of-pie tonalist paintings, but for different reasons. You see, this painting is green because the subject – grass– is green. The delta painting is blue-violet because the color theme is blue-violet. That's a subjective decision, a conscious choice on my part. The landmass, nor the trees, nor the sky was actually blue-violet. The grass in the cow painting is actually green. I didn't force a color theme onto it.

So why is that important? Technically speaking, (and this is just my observation and I might be wrong so take it with a grain of salt) When you're making a gray painting because the scene actually looks gray, you still need to pay a lot of attention to warm-cool relationships. A clear example is Sargent's Venice Par Temps Gris (yesterday's post) . Look at the soft cast shadows of the people in the foreground – see how warm they are compared to the surrounding lit surface?

In contrast, when you're working in a subjective single-color theme situation, forcing color temperatures can really screw up the painting because in this color system, temperature shifts are often irrelevant. You might sneak some of it in if you do it extremely subtly, but you can't do it like the impressionists. It's just a different system of organizing visual reality, and the two don't mix.

There are other reasons for using a narrow-piece-of-pie, like when the light has a lot of color; late afternoon sun, or nocturnal situations under mercury street lights. The orange light of the afternoon sun might bathe everything in orange, but the shadow side might look really blue because of the sky's blue ambient light. On the other hand, if everything looks orange in the afternoon because the atmosphere is lit orange, and this orange atmosphere veils the shadows as well as the lit areas, you aren't going to get much temperature shifts at all. Forcing cool shadows in this case might ruin the desired atmospheric mood. Painting L.A. smog falls under this category. In each case, you have to determine BEFORE you start, whether temperature shifts are relevant or not. Knowing why it might or might not be relevant will allow you to make that distinction with confidence, and that confidence will most definitely show in your work.

So go ahead. take a small piece of the pie. Or take the whole pie. But if you take a small piece, don't pretend you have the whole pie, and vice versa. Bon appétit!