I learn that painting like Vincent takes BALLS!

Hello, art lovers!

I know that I am a little behind on the blog; I have come to the realization that writing two blogs a week was not leaving me enough time to paint and to do the research and reading that I wanted to do on Van Gogh in order to write the blog. (I will confess that I also got myself caught in an all consuming Breaking Bad (amc) marathon, which I was absolutely riveted by - it was definitely television worth watching, and I have watched four seasons worth in the past two weeks) So, I shall be limiting my blog postings to once a week, beginning this week.

Vincent's painting

                                                                                   The painting I have selected is sprig of flowering almond in a glass, which Van Gogh painted in March of 1888, just after his arrival in Arles.  (Thanks to fellow blogger Chris Crockett for teaching me a more elegant way of doing the links - check out her blog at musingsfromkaty.blogspot.com)

Vincent had escaped the cold dreariness of Paris that spring, and expected to be greeted by warm, temperate weather upon his arrival in the South of France.  He was anxious to be outdoors painting, and could not wait to feel the heat of the sun upon his back as he explored his new surroundings.  He was greeted, instead, by a deep snow that left him stuck, new in town, friendless and isolated in a small room.  Looking for a subject, he cut a budding branch from an almond tree, then forced the blooms indoors.  Once it had started to blossom, Vincent painted it, simply, suspended in water in a cheap, thickly pressed glass.

The still life depicts the buds of earliest spring, as well as branches reaching out toward the viewer and toward heaven above.  The subject is warmly lighted by the sunlight streaming through a nearby window, and the blossoms appear vibrant and pulsing with life.  The color of the buds is subdued, but you can see new vibrancy - in pinks, greens, peaches and blues, peeking just below and through the petals. Could Vincent have selected a more perfect metaphor for the hopeful beginning of his new life in Arles?

My version

Above you will see my version of VvG's painting; but before you see how I did it, I digress with a little chat about color:

Art critics have described Van Gogh's time in Arles as "an explosion of color," and  his exploration of the full and rich palette of colors, light and scenery of the south gave him a voice as one of the first great artists of the early 20th century.

Vincent's sense of color was both innate and cultivated.  Like the perspective frame we discussed earlier, Van Gogh used tools to help him "see" colors with more clarity.  My favorite of these tools was a basket full of balled yarn.  As he planned his paintings, Vincent would twine different colors of the yarn together to see how the colors reacted to each other.

I liked this idea so much, that I made my own yarn balls out of old embroidery floss, left over needlepoint wool, and crewel yarn:

We all know what "clashing" colors are.  They are two (or more) colors that, when placed side by side, do something that just doesn't look "right."  We also know what complimentary colors are: they are colors that, when placed next to each other, sing and hum and vibrate together in a beautiful way.

But what makes them clash?  What makes them hum?  Is it fashion, taste, perception, or something more?  Let's start with color 101.

You probably already know about primary colors, which are single, pure and unmixed.  Secondary colors are a muddling of two primaries, and tertiary colors are a mixture of three.  A HUE is the name of a color (like Red).  WARM colors (yellow, orange and red) advance (meaning they come forward in the painting) and COOL colors (green, blue and violet) recede (meaning they fall back in the painting).
                   
One of the color tools used by artists is a color wheel.  This tool lays out the colors in a particular and consistent way, so all (painter's) color wheels everywhere are laid out in exactly the same fashion and the colors always appear in the same order.

Arbitrarily calling this the front

Because it is a wheel, there is no "first" color; all of the colors are equal.  On the color wheel shown at left (front), there are six single name colors:  Blue, Violet, Red, Orange, Yellow and Green.  They always sit in between dual name colors, and "marry" the single name colors together: Blue Violet, Red Violet, Red Orange, Yellow Orange, Yellow Green, and Blue Green.  So, going around the wheel we have Blue, Blue Violet, Red Violet, Red, Red Orange, Yellow Orange, Yellow, Yellow Green, Green, and Blue Green.

But if you are painting, the point is just to pick the color you want and who cares what it is called, right?

Well, that's where the layout of the color wheel comes into play.  Once you pick your color, the color wheel can help you to figure out which color is gonna play nicely with another color.

And, on a whim, calling this the back

Blue is always right across from Orange.  Green is always opposite Red.  Violet and Yellow spend long hours staring at each other.  Colors that are opposite each other on the wheel are called complimentary, and that means exactly what it sounds like.  Each individual color looks better because their buddy constantly compliments them, and they each make us think that their buddy color is fabulous.

The following photographs feature colors against what is called a neutral grey background.  White is sometimes difficult to see colors against, because white can have its own sneaky undertones that can be blue, or red or yellow.  If you are confused by a color, try putting it on something grey; you will be able see it more clearly then.

Now back to the balls of yarn.  When I first began twining my leftover threads, yarns and fibers into balls, I noticed that there were many variations in the colors, even in the extremely limited palette of odds and ends that I had in my sewing kit.

The balls divided by hue

As you can see above, there were a lot of different greens, blues, reds, purples, oranges, browns and yellows.  There were also whites and creams, varying blacks and grays, and many lightened "sherbet" versions of each of the colors, like petal pinks, icy blues, minty greens, lemony yellows, etc.  If you look closely, I think you will see colors that you think I put in the wrong dish - there are greens that could easily go in the blue bowl, and purples that could have been construed as pink, etc. etc.

these defy categorization

Most of the colors were, in fact, very difficult to categorize.  Take a glance at the photo at left.  Is the ball on the left  green?  A softened white?  Grey?   Bluish?  Taupe?                

And how about the one on the right.  Is it pink?  A softened white?  Grey?  Purplish? Taupe?

Additions just make it more confusing

What happens when I throw a few other, quite similar hues into the mix?  (to add to the degree of difficulty, I also apparently turned the camera, reversing the original colors on the bottom row) How is the new pink (upper left) playing off of the original pinky hue?  What does that do with the purple at the upper right?  Has the minty green browned next to these other colors, gone whiter?  faded?

The point of this exercise is to spend some time really looking at and thinking about color.  There is no right or wrong; only observation and reaction.

Are they greens?  Blues?  Whites?  Yellows?

Notice above how the colors seem to reflect and bounce off of each other - a good example is the ball that is the second from the top left, which is really reflecting the blue on ball the just below it.  You can also see a dark green reflection on the ball that is four down on the left side, and again, more dark green on both sides of the ball at the bottom left.

So now our focus has shifted from naming to seeing.  The point of the naming, for me, is to know enough about the color names to express (to myself) what I need for the color to do - this green will work if I just make it a little more yellow - not orangey yellow, but soft, lemony custard - very buttery yellow...  


That is how you make a specific color so you can match something that you are trying to paint.  But how does that color do, when sitting next to another color?  Let's go back to Vincent's painting.

You can see that we have green in the branch that is next to a clayish red (the stripe on the wall and his signature).  There is greenish - turquoise ocean - blue next to an orangey yellow, interspersed with creamy yellows and greens in the table cloth.  The neutral whitish wall is washed from beneath by red, blue, green and grey.  Some of the colors are complementary, but some are not.

Do the colors in the painting work for you?  It is OK if they don't.  Obviously they worked for Vincent (he signed it), but art is a two way street.  Just because Vincent painted it, does not mean that you or I or anybody else is not entitled to have an opinion about it.  Like all things to do with color, either you like it, or you don't, or your opinion falls somewhere in between.

So what might Vincent have done to work out this color scheme in advance?

Vincent's color scheme

The colors that you see on the right (or, as close as I can get to them with the colors I have on hand) approximate most of the colors that Vincent used in his painting.  Softened lemony yellow, petal pink, delicate lilac, creamy white, new growth brown and minty green make up the majority of light colors.  The few darks that are featured in the painting include a deep reddish clay, russet brown, evergreen and blue.

Again, with no right or wrong, no names or preconceived ideas about the colors, do you think that the colors look "nice" together?

Do you think that the colors in the Van Gogh look "nice" together?  I have to admit that when I saw this painting, I liked the composition and subject, but I thought that the colors were a little weird.  Not bad, just a bit weird.  So what do YOU think of the colors?




And now comes the fun part, where get to start marrying the colors together.

I took specific colors and entwined them to other specific colors.  First, the complimentaries:



 Red and Green
     (left)




                         Blue and Orange (right)
                                    




and Yellow and Purple (left)



Are you noticing how common these pairings are? Christmas decorations?  Football teams?  Flower colorations?

What do you think of the way they look together?

Do they compliment one another?  Do they fight, or play nicely?  Do you like them?

I encourage you to open yourself to think about color.  It is all around you, and always interacting - It is so common, though, that we sometimes don't see it.  Don't miss color - it makes the world an interesting place to be.

And now, for the painting.

 In a very unusual move for me, I started with a study.  I had some pastels that I wanted to try out, so I could see how the pastel did on one of my pre - gessoed melamine boards.

I started with a sketch, which you can see (at right) that I compared to the original on the google art project.

Here is a more close up photo of the sketch; I was trying to get pretty close to Vincent's layout.

At right you can see the initial laying down of colors with the pastels.  Despite it being recommended as good for pastels, I did not like the way they worked on the smoothly gessoed board - there was not enough "tooth" for the pastels to get a grip on the surface.

And yet more color.  Then I set it aside and decided it was time to paint.

Here is my sketch for the painting.  Note that my canvas is configured to be a bit taller than Vincent's, so I had a lot of empty space at the bottom, which threw off the original composition.

Here is the computer comparison where you can see the compositional differences.

I resolved the empty space at the bottom by adding in a few extra blooming branches.

Here is the only additional picture I took of the work in progress.  (I promise to leave my camera right on my easel in the future and to set a timer.  I promise!)

I have the glass sketched out in blue, and put in dark browns and greens on the branches.  The blossoms were rendered with magentas, pinks and creams, with centers of yellow.

I used a minty, whitish green for the highlights on the branches, buds, and edges of the blossoms.

Below is one more shot at both finished paintings.  Note the differences in color selection; my tablecloth is purply lilac instead of yellow - my blooms are much pinker than Vincent's creamy blossoms.  Is one "right" and the other "wrong?"  What do you think of the choices I made, and of the ones that Vincent selected?  How would YOU paint it?  Please feel free to share your own work, or just your opinion, if you are so inclined.






Thanks again for reading; I hope to return to our regular schedule this week.