Painting Tonally

After the Harvest, 11 x 14 inches, oil on linen

The painting above is a tonalist landscape; most of my paintings are. In contrast to high key, colorful works with lots of complementary action and chroma-rich shadows, this landscape uses very few colors. In fact, It's pretty much all oranges and reds, and muted ones at that. On the color wheel, orange and red are analogous. That is to say, next to each other. If you imagine the color wheel as a pie, what I used in my painting is a very small slice of pie. And that's one way to look at tonalism; a narrow piece of pie. I have a little bit of pale yellow on the ground plane, but that too is analogous to orange, right? A slightly larger piece of pie, but still a far cry from getting the whole pie like the high-key colorists do.

It seems like I'm getting a raw deal when I use the pie analogy. But there is a lot to be gained by using a small piece of pie. Simplicity. Harmony. Mood. These are all important to me, and with the narrow piece of the pie I'm able to tap into these ideas without confusing the issues (that is, if I'm successful).

But how do you make a convincing landscape with such few colors? First and foremost, you have to rely on value shifts. There is a very simple value structure to the design, of basically three values; Dark trees, medium land mass, and light sky. By keeping these big elements sufficiently separated by big value jumps, We can keep the design simple. There are smaller value shifts within the big elements, you'll notice. These internal value shifts must be subtle so that the big shapes don't get fragmented. When you squint at the tree, for example, we should just see the silhouette, despite the value shifts within the tree shape.

Wait, wasn't this post supposed to be about atmosphere? Well, it turns out, painting with a very narrow piece of the pie is a very good way to achieve atmospheric perspective because by its very nature, you're forced to paint the distant trees and hills (or whatever) the same hue as the foreground. The logic being applied here, is that you're not painting trees or hills (or whatever) but you're painting the atmosphere in front of it. The atmosphere has color which affects everything you see (much like wearing colored sunglasses) , and this color just happens to be – surprise – that narrow piece of the pie. You still have to control values and chroma to get convincing depth, but there's your atmosphere.

For focal areas, you may want a little more oompf. An obvious way to do that would be through value contrast and sharp edges. (See the roof on the other side of the field) Introducing other hues for the focal area sometimes works, but you have to be careful or it just looks like a mistake. What I did here is keep everything more or less muted down, and used a more saturated note of orange right where the focal point is. This way, you can reliably maintain harmony and unity in your painting.

But what if you're painting an red-orange-yellow painting but the sky is blue? Then what? The blue is, like, nowhere near my narrow piece of the pie!

This is where the "color is relative" rule must be applied with a little more care. In essence, the blue sky is not necessarily blue. It's blue relative to the orange context. When I isolate the bluest part of my sky and take it out of context, you can see that it's still within the orange piece of the pie. It's sort of a mauvy gray.

But this same color thrown in a sea of more saturated oranges become perceptively bluer.

Another way of thinking about this might be that it's a slightly bluer version of the orange. If you take a mix of orange puddle and start to add some blue into it, the color becomes more and more gray because the two hues are complementary. If you continue to mix blue into the mix, at some point it'll go past the neutral gray and become bluer and bluer. But you don't really have to go all the way to the blue side of the pie (nor do you want to) if you have established an orange context. (that is to say, you've committed yourself to taking only the orange piece of the pie) As you can see from this example, you don't even have to go all the way to neutral gray.

You do have to keep in mind at all times, what your color context is, and think about color relationships rather than individual colors. I think I've mentioned it before, but practicing painting tonally is a great way to sharpen your sensitivity to color relationships. Simplicity is the key. Oh, and use saturated notes sparingly.

Next, I'll post another tonalist landscape that's in the blue-violet piece of the pie. Stay tuned.