Twilight, White Light, Silver Woods

all 8" x 10" oil on panel

I just came across this Van Gogh, Painter on His Way to Work. I've never seen it before. There are so many paintings I haven't seen in person or in books that are viewable on-line. My professors in graduate school said there were only black and white photographs of paintings when they were students. It's so different now.

Of course I love the bracketing with the two trees in this one. They are like figures, the actual figure bisecting them. The lyricism is embedded in the color, space, and shape play. The vanishing point in the upper left marked by the point of the green field/triangle. The arch leading to its apex makes a shape echoed in the walking stick and the artist's leg and shadow, suggesting a gait or bounce in the step created by this visual rhythm.

The color in my new landscape paintings is subdued with Silver Woods crossing the divide into drawing. Twilight has a complementary blue/orange thing going on which contributes to the sense of tension between the trees. The curved black shape at the bottom seems to suggest looking out a car window. The neutral plane on the right edge has strokes connecting the black with the trees. The central light blue light is the calm amongst it all.

There is a fluidity in all of them that I like and a space I don't usually paint. I'm typically drawn to very open spaces but here the focus is finding open spaces within the woods. Leaves rustle, wind blows, shadows move. The planes of trees, space, and ground interact. The green leaves in White Light appear to extend toward the viewer, a tricky thing. I would like to do it again, to puzzle it out, to feel it again and reinvent it. I'll see what I can do.

Across From Cobblestone

26" x 20"

oil on canvas

The color structure of this one is very ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple = full spectrum - rainbow). Such a color scheme often can be too sweet, too child-like for my purposes, but the balance of colors and their tonality evade the trap. There is playfulness, however, as in many of my paintings. While painting the branches of the gray tree running in front of the pine I thought of an earlier blog comment about dots, resolution, and the appearance of Christmas tree lights while one's glasses are off. That is a relaxing, dream-like moment based in vision. The activity of making the dots is an indulgence in that kind of state of mind. It is a form of meditation. Although we all get busy, often out of necessity, I think there is some wisdom in a quote of Socrates: "Beware the barrenness of a busy life". It is easy to miss things if we can't stand still.

Back to the formal aspects of painting. Color Theory was one of the classes I taught while a professor of fine arts. Some exercises I gave to students were invented by painter, teacher, and color theorist Joseph Albers. He had his students find color swatches from magazines, which takes forever. Color Aid paper is standard now.

Our color perception is effected by the surroundings of a color, their context.The first exercise is called "3=4" The coral colored square on the right is the color that is going to change its appearance based on the ground it is on. Thus three colors: left ground, right, ground, and swatch will now equal four perceptually. It seems like magic. So those little strips hugging the edges of the rectangles are both the same color, this coralish thing. To do the exercise one needs to flip through a variety of colors on the left and the right in order to change the appearance of the swatch. Backgrounds can vary in intensity, saturation, tone, and hue. It is much more difficult if the swatch is cut larger than those strips and is not recommended for this exercise. As you can see, the strip on the left is lighter and more yellow than the one on the right. Students are first able to see the difference of light and dark and then the difference in hue. Subtle changes aren't perceived initially and there is often a bit of disbelief that the professor is seeing something that they can't.

3 = 4

The second exercise is similar. The search for grounds this time will be focused on making two different colors look the same. Two grounds plus two swatches = 4 then made to look like 3 total. The more different the colors are, the more difficult the exercise. In such cases the two may be brought closer together, but an exact replication may be all but impossible. The study below has a bright middle-of-the-road green and a lighter, muted yellow-green. Differences in the exercise are fairly perceptible, but they look much more like the same color than when they are isolated.








4 = 3

This theory gets put into practice in my work as a dot of a particular hue in one area of a painting looks different when placed somewhere else. A harmony is created as the colors seem to relate, to have something in common that makes them easy on the eye.