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I remember the day I sat at the counter at Reading Terminal and had chowder for lunch. It was a day I was in despair. No matter what I learned or how hard I tried, I just could not rise up from the streaks and mud of oil paint. The chowder helped a bit, and after getting lost in the delicacies of Reading Terminal, I found the courage to go back and try again.
Later that night, I came across this, in one of the handouts we'd received during the course. It's an excerpt from the book: A Way of Seeing and the Spiritual Search for Visual Truth in Painting: The Teachings of Hensche, Hawthorne, and Chase, by Barbara Faulkner, PhD.
Richard Kelso believes that the lifelong "learning curve" of the painter means that every day the painter gets out of bed knowing "they're going to get whipped that day". For him, the daunting prospect of daily failure is balanced by hoping and imagining "that one day you're going to be able to paint well."
Two samples of color studies. At the top is a demo by Ja Fang Lu. Natalie Italiano created the one at the bottom.You can see here how a color study is not a finished painting, but is an exercise to understand the way colors relate to each other, in order to capture the feeling of illumination of your subject.
Colours should not be tormented. Colours should be applied simply, directly, and separately.
Rubens, "De Lumine et De Colores:" 1635
Ja Fang Lu, another one of our instructors, demonstrates a color study. A color study is not a finished painting, it's an opportunity to see color as a relationship, and to deepen perception.
These are the steps for a color study, from Studio Incamminati: - Consider a problem you want to explore
- Compose your color study so that you can make five to seven initial color statements
- Make a grisaille underpainting clearly differentiating what's lit and what's in shade.
- Make strong statements of color, maintaining the differentiation of what's lit and what's in shade.
- Use enough paint to make definite color statements.
- Make each statement a strong identifiable color.
- Cover the entire canvas, and make adjustments to individual color statements to relate to the whole.
- Keep scanning the entire set-up and the entire canvas to adjust colors. Try not to stare into a color, but instead look at colors around and next to it. Flick your eyes, blur your vision, and shake your head to see the color in relation to what's around it.
- Continue to make adjustments until no further adjustment suggests itself.
- Evaluate the color study by how well it conveys the sense and feeling of the set up.
The next stage, after closed grisaille, was adding tonal variations to the painting. We were encouraged to stick with just three tones; light, medium and dark.
The painting on the top is my first attempt. The one on the bottom is my final tonal painting before we moved on to color studies. It's one where I felt that something was "happening," where the concepts I was learning were starting to come together.
