Panels & Palettes

The Pool at Dusk
Oil 20 x 30


After my last post (thanking everyone who responded), I got several emails this past week from people wanting to know what I had discovered on my quest to reproduce the Magic Panel. I got a huge amount of information and some differences of opinion, all of which I appreciate immensely. Right now I am doing my own little R&D project by testing out three different gessos (Artisan, Utrecht, and Art Boards) and Gamblin Ground on hardboard, gatorboard and birch. The plan is to make a bunch of different panels with different grounds and supports, paint on them, then report back.

I've also had several emails over the last few months asking about my palette. I talked a little about that and my technique for doing under paintings followed by layers of transparent color here. When I started to paint again about 18 years ago (yikes!), I started with a limited palette because that's what my teacher and mentor, Ned Jacob, used. I stuck with it for a long time and I'm glad I did. Limited palettes are great for teaching you how to mix color and making you focus on the components of color (value, temperature and chroma). As time went by, I modified the limited palette to suit my needs, but pretty much stayed with primaries, ivory black and white. Last year, when I started working in a more indirect manner, using glazes and scumbling, I knew that I needed to address opacity vs transparency, something I'd not ever really thought much about.

I started out by working with the transparent colors that are well known and obvious- ivory black, burnt sienna, sap green, ultramarine blue. I also already had a color called Shale by Vasari on my palette which is a rich warm transparent dark with a violet undertone. An artist friend suggested I try Indian Yellow - and that was all it took- I was hooked. Wow! what a color! Where had it been all my life!! What other colors had I been ignoring?!?

A little research quickly led me to Gamblin. I was already using some of their products (Gamsol, primarily) so I checked out their line of transparent colors. Now many are in my paint box- transparent orange (every bit as wonderful as it sounds), transparent earth yellow, transparent earth red, ultramarine violet, brown pink (delicious!), hansa yellow light, terre verte, olive green and indanthrone blue. I've also added naples yellow, which is opaque, but mixes beautifully with many of these transparent colors.

So that is how I went from three colors to a "joy ride in a paint box"( as Churchill once famously said) .

J.M.W. Turner in Dallas- Part 2

This is the second post on my visit to the exhibition J.M.W. Turner at the Dallas Museum of Art. You can read the first post here.

As I mentioned in my first post, I always feel a bit like I am entering a shrine when I go to an exhibition of this sort. Both as an artist and a lover of art (and those can be two completely different things) being in the presence of the work of an artist I admire and revere is a humbling and reverent experience. In Turner's case, it is perhaps doubly so because his work has had a profound and transformative influence on the art of landscape itself and on the work of so many artists including me.

It is not exaggeration to say that Turner, along with his contemporary John Constable, charted the course of landscape art from a backwater, second class genre to the towering achievement of late nineteenth century art, Impressionism. Turner has been called the first impressionist but I think that is a simplistic, linear way of looking at what he achieved. What he set out to do and did was to express the idea of light, air and atmosphere in his paintings.

When Turner turned to oil painting he came to the medium as an accomplished watercolorist. His early works were completed in a traditional way on a dark toned ground and worked up with a fairly well developed under painting followed by opaque touches and some glazing to bring the whole to completion. As his career progressed, partly because of his watercolor background and partly because of his fascination with Venetian painting techniques, he began to experiment with the use of light colored grounds which would be more reflective and create luminosity, especially when used in concert with glazing. Turner was avidly interested in the new pigments which were becoming available, particularly in yellow and whites, which he believed were necessary to express light in his pictures. He often used a mixed media approach, using both oil and watercolor in the same painting. His experimentation has unfortunately led to some of his paintings being in extremely poor condition - even during his own lifetime.

His quest to portray light and atmosphere also resulted in the forms in his paintings becoming less substantial, often dissolving into or emerging from the light through veils of translucent color. Contemporary accounts of his painting methods indicate that he relied heavily both on glazing and scumbling to achieve these effects. The result are works which appear startlingly modern. Subject matter was essential to Turner but light and color became the most important formal concerns of his art. In that way, he seems to actually leap frog over the Impressionists into modernity - toward Helen Frankenthaler and Rothko.

But Turner most certainly loved the landscape and his devotion to its many facets comes through in these works. He used light and color to describe the idea of the Sublime with which he believed the natural world to be imbued. It is that, for me, which gives these works power and timelessness.

Starts and Finishes

Over the last couple of months I have gotten several emails asking questions about various aspects of my painting process. Since I don't have a small painting to post today, I thought it might be a good time to write about that... if anyone happens to be interested. First, I should say that my painting process has changed pretty radically over the last year, so what I say here isn't something I've been doing a long while or am even sure is the way I should be doing it. Previously and for many years , I worked in a fairly direct way- not exactly alla prima (except outdoors) but definitely direct. Now, I am painting in a more indirect method which involves using layers of paint - and more passages of transparent paint. So here is a typical lay in using a color made by Vasari called Shale. It is the workhorse dark on my palette- I like it because its transparent and has a warm violet undertone. I used to thin my paint with OMS for this stage, but now I often use an almost dry brush technique to put this first layer down because it will show through in portions of the finished painting. This is also why I like a linen with a little bit of texture so that I can also use that texture to describe elements of the landscape, like here, where the texture of the canvas and the drybrush help describe the field. I also use a rag to wipe out lights and a palette knife to scrape out finer lights.

Here is the next stage of the painting where more transparent layers have been added to the trees and also the field. When you are planning to use layers of glazes you have to be very careful not to get things too dark too quickly. Unlike a more direct method - where you can always adjust the value of a shape with another coat of opaque paint- if you want to keep that area transparent, you have to get it exactly right from the start (which is always a good idea anyway!). In addition, because successive glazes will darken the glazed area, you have to start a bit lighter than you plan to end up. I will also use a scumble occasionally( a thinned translucent layer of paint, usually containing white or some other light opaque mixture) to lighten an area, or to soften edges and create atmosphere. I use Liquin as a medium. I also use it between layers to "oil out" the painting- that is to bring the colors and values back to their original state so another layer can be accurately judged against what has already been laid down. Here, the opaque portions of the painting, the water and sky, haven't been laid in yet but the light value of the canvas "stands in" for that value. Using transparent paint in the darks and opaque paint in the lights is pretty standard procedure, but I like to mix it up sometimes, using mostly transparent paint for the entire piece like here or transparent paint in some of the lights, like here.

Here is the finished painting. The sky and water have been added with opaque paint (Naples yellow and Gamblin Brown Pink + a touch of white) and then glazed over with several transparent layers. More layers have been added to the trees and ground plane, creating what I hope is a rich color harmony. This painting is available at Ernest Fuller Fine Art in Denver, Colorado.