Tag: learning

If you have been following along here, you will know by now that my real passion is not so much finishing paintings as learning colour. Mixing it, getting it wrong, and slowly working out why. This post is really just three more installments of that same education: one from the easel, one from YouTube, and one from a podcast.

A small painting

About ten years ago I bought a tiny oil painting on eBay, a yellow butterfly resting on honeysuckle, only 8cm wide by 5cm. Up close you can see exactly what it is built from: loose, confident strokes that don’t pretend to be anything more than paint. Step back, and it resolves itself instantly into a butterfly catching the light on a honeysuckle flower. I think that gap, between what it is close up and what it becomes at a distance, is exactly why I love it. It is clearly the work of someone who knew what they were doing. The highs and lows sit balanced, and there is a sense of movement in the brushwork, as though the paint itself is still fluttering.

As an exercise, I set myself the task of copying it, but three times the size. Working larger changes everything, of course. Marks that read as instinctive at 8cm have to be rebuilt thoughtfully at 24cm. Really though, the process is just looking and copying. Looking hard at where the butterfly sits and how much space breathes around it, then copying that placement into its new, larger world, leaving proper room for the two large honeysuckle flowers rather than letting them crowd in.

I took a photograph of the original and turned it to greyscale, which made the values, the lights and darks, far easier to read than they are in colour. I propped both the original and that greyscale print up next to the easel, along with a little pocket colour wheel, so I could keep checking back against them rather than trusting my memory. Then I mixed a raw umber wash, keeping the fat over lean principle in mind so nothing thicker went down before the thinner layers, and started blocking in those values, leaving the butterfly itself as bare, untouched paper while the background went in dark around it.

The surface drank up the paint quickly, which let me move through the first washes faster than I expected, a slightly grey, muted green for the background. The ground itself looked warm to me, so I built it from warm-leaning primaries, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, and ultramarine blue, mixing until I had something close to right, then knocking the saturation back with a touch of titanium white. I thinned that mix with a little thinner and liquin and laid it down in one pass, then went back over it with a second, slightly darker layer once the first had settled.

I started with the values, blocking everything in with raw umber first and building up the dark areas, while leaving the lightest values of the yellow wings completely untouched. I’m getting into the habit, and the penny is dropping, that I ought to get my values and structure sorted before a scrap of colour goes anywhere near the canvas. It is proving just as useful copying someone else’s painting as it is working from life.

As I worked on the replica, it reminded me of a book I have called Van Gogh Repetitions, by Eliza Rathbone and William H. Robinson. It looks at the many different paintings Van Gogh made of the same subject, each in different values and different families of colour and saturation, what he himself called his “repetitions” rather than copies. What I find interesting is that a painting can still work perfectly well even when the colours aren’t realistic, so long as the values are right. You can paint a subject almost any colour you like, provided the tonal structure holds it together.

A closer look

There is real movement in this little painting, a lightness in the honeysuckle flowers and a lightness in the handling itself, nothing overworked. I have read that butterflies are often taken to mean renewal, and I keep wondering whether that dark, muted background against the cool, bright butterfly is doing exactly that for me, whether without meaning to I have been drawn to a small piece of symbolism about coming out of darkness. Which, without wanting to sound too grand about an 8cm painting bought on eBay, is not far off the title of Tracey Emin’s recent Margate show, Crossing Into Darkness, which takes darkness as a threshold you pass through toward renewal rather than something to fear. I doubt the original painter was thinking anything of the sort. I doubt I was either, until I sat with it long enough to wonder.

I also find myself imagining what else might be in the picture if it were painted larger, whether this butterfly is resting on honeysuckle at the edge of a motorway with lorries thundering past just out of frame, or deep in a forest where nobody will ever see it at all. The painting gives you none of that context, which is rather the point. It hands you a moment and lets you decide what surrounds it.

What I have been listening to

I am spending more and more time with art documentaries and podcasts lately. My favourite this week was a Louisiana Channel film on the artist Y.Z. Kami. He shares my fondness for the smell of oil paint, which I found strangely comforting to hear, but it was his way of working that stayed with me. The portraits, and those strange circular canvases that seem to draw you in until they disappear into something close to oblivion.

I also went back to an episode of Talk Art with Tracey Emin from a few months back. I particularly like the way Dame Emin talks about her own work.

In fact, I think the artists I return to most often are the ones who are generous about sharing their thinking: their process, their failures, and what actually makes them want to paint in the first place.

I think showing art is only half the story and perhaps my love of art is also just as weighted to the story behind the piece and about the artist. I could listen to Tracey Emin talk for hours.

Keeping track of it all

I am tempted to start building a proper list here on the blog: books, talks, YouTube channels, podcasts, a small library of the things that have taught me something. I already keep a version of this privately in Obsidian, a free note-taking app and, so far, a brilliant place to gather notes, half-formed ideas, and the odd stray thought before I forget it. It syncs across my iPhone and my Mac too, so I can jot something down at two in the morning and pick it up again properly the next day at the desk.

Thank you for reading. Back to the butterfly next.

I have always known, in the way you know a fact without really knowing it, that you can make almost anything from red, yellow and blue. It is one of those things you are told quite early on in school art class but didn’t really understand it or never really practiced the art of mixing primaries. So today I did. I taped a sheet of oil paper to the table, squeezed out a cadmium yellow, a cadmium red, and a cobalt blue, and gave myself an afternoon to see what they were really capable of.

The exercise

The first column was straightforward enough. Crimson into cadmium, in different measures, walking from a deep pink through to orange and on to a colour that was practically a warm gold by the time white joined in. I could see the whole thing coming and mostly it behaved. But the moment I moved on to greens I understood why so many painted landscapes end up looking a bit municipal. Cadmium and cobalt on their own gave me something closer to khaki than any leaf I have ever stood under, and it took several goes, nudging the ratio one way and then the other, before I found a green with any life in it. Sixty percent cobalt to forty cadmium, roughly, was where it started to sing. Any more yellow and it went sickly. Any more blue and it went flat.

The surprise of black

The real surprise was the last column. I had always reached for a tube of black without giving it much thought, the way you reach for salt without measuring it. But mixing my own, from cobalt, crimson and a touch of cadmium, gave me something with far more depth than anything from a tube. There was a purple lurking in there, and a bottle green, and once I added white it came out lilac rather than grey. A black that is actually made of colour behaves quite differently from a black that is simply black, and it was only by mixing it myself, badly at first, that I understood why.

Why this matters

I know this is exactly the kind of exercise every painting book tells you to do in the first chapter, and I have skimmed past that chapter more than once over the years, always keen to get on with something that looked more like a painting. What I am learning, rather later than I would like, is that this is the painting. Or at least it is the part that everything else depends on. You cannot really see what you are doing with colour until you have stood in front of a palette and made the mistakes for yourself, watched a green go muddy and had to work out why, rather than simply reading that it might.

I mentioned in my first post here that colour is relational, that a yellow changes depending on what sits beside it. Today’s exercise has given me the raw material to actually test that properly, now that I have a small library of mixes with notes on how I got there, rather than just a feeling I am chasing from memory each time.

While I had paint on my hands I had the Louisiana Channel’s interview with David Hockney playing in the background, one of the last videos he did before passing away a few weeks ago. He makes the point that everything drawn or painted is an abstraction, however faithful it looks, because you are always translating a three-dimensional, moving, coloured world onto a flat surface using marks that are never quite the thing itself. I found that oddly reassuring while looking at nine little smears of paint that were meant to be a leaf. My green is not going to be the hedge outside my window. It was never going to be. It is my abstraction of it, built from three tubes of paint and an afternoon of getting it wrong, and that is rather the point of doing it by hand at all. He also talks in that same series about painting needing the hand, the eye and the heart together, and today felt like a fairly literal demonstration of that: the hand mixing, the eye judging, and a fair bit of heart required to keep going once the fourth green in a row still was not right. If you have half an hour, it is well worth watching in full: David Hockney interviewed by Louisiana Channel.

Practical advice for beginners

If you are starting out and colour feels like a mystery, as it did to me for a long time, my only real advice from today is this: buy three tubes, tape down a sheet of paper, and just mix. Write down your ratios as you go, because you will not remember them otherwise, and expect the first few to disappoint you. That disappointment is doing something useful. It is teaching you far more than a colour wheel ever could, and it is exactly where I said in my first post about learning to see colour that most of my real education has come from.

Thank you for reading this one. I have a feeling I will be back at that palette again before the week is out.