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Suffering from a major headache, I didn't take a lot of pictures today while working. Just pushed through. But I wanted to talk a little bit about this painting because, despite the headache, I really enjoyed working on it today. I started it much the same as I always do with a wash of burnt umber. I knew I wanted a dark background (I'm a sucker for chiarascurro) so I started with my usual base of umber and then added some ultramarine blue to darken it on one side and some naples yellow and raw sienna on the right to lighten it a bit.
The lemons were executed with zinc yellow and bits of black and umber for the shadows. The peonies were simply done and I was amazed at how quickly they popped off my brush. These were done with Alazarin Crimsen, Manganese Violet and touches of cad red light mixed with, of course white. The centers had a bit of cad orange in them. To push the blooms back, I used a bit of the background and some green from the lemons to gray out the reds.
The vase wasn't glazed but instead I just built it out of thick paint and used cobalt blue for the design. I nocked down the white with umber and a bit of naples yellow.
I'm paying a lot of attention to edge control these days and trying to make each brush stroke count. David Leffel says that a poor brush stroke deliberately made is far better than one that has been just splashed on without forethought. I have to agree with this because some of my best work is work that I have been deliberate and totally present for. It's an act of consciousness and a bit of meditation. It takes tons of concentration, and I generally turn off all music in the studio in order to just be present.
I talked about the discipline of "showing up" in one of my posts and today was a good example of that. There are days when the paint just flows off the brush and all the relationships manage to come together. But if you don't show up, it can't happen. I had a miserable headache and the urge to just lie down with a cold compress nearly kept me from walking through the door. I awfully glad I did. This is a beauty of a painting. Painterly but detailed. I love the cool light and feel pretty good about the color relationships as well.
The area of color relationships is another topic altogether. Duane Keiser says, and who am I to argue with the guru, that mixing the right color is pretty much instinctual. It's color relationships that give students the most trouble. I'm not sure if I completely agree with this. I have a couple of students that are really struggling with the issue of temperature. But most do get it pretty quickly. Relationships, though, that's another story. The questions must always be asked when working from life, "is that color warmer or cooler, darker or lighter than the one next to it?" Also, it's not enough to just question the immediate relationship but also how each color affects all the other ones in the painting. What looks fine on the palette often translates to "agh!" on the canvas. I have my students work always with a color wheel next to them.
Enough of these ramblings. I'll be talking more about color relationships and how to better judge them in future posts.
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