(Private Collection)
During my senior year of college, while I was planning for graduate school applications, my advisor suggested that I apply to graduate school as a printmaker rather than a painter because my black and white work was much stronger than my paintings (which was true). She told me that some people just "get" color and others don't and I was going to have to accept the fact that I was one the ones that don't. She said that was okay; I could focus on working in black and white. I was willing to accept this opinion at the time. I ultimately ended up applying to graduate school as a printmaker and the paintings that I did do during that period were essentially monochromatic. But I never really conceded that I couldn't master color. Years later, when I decided to seriously take up painting again, my lack of skill and understanding of how to work with color became immediately (and painfully) apparent. Unwilling to capitulate, I rolled up my sleeves and delved into a serious study of color. For three years I worked tirelessly studying the phenomenon of color-mixing and color relationships. I had taken a Color course at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts with the wonderful Maggie Fitzpatrick, which, based primarily in the theories of Johanas Itten, focused on understanding color as having three components (value, hue, and saturation) and using a 12-step color wheel composed of the three primary colors (yellow, red, blue), three secondary colors (orange, green, violet ¬– mixture of the primaries), and the six intermediate colors resulting from the mixtures of the primaries and secondaries. I read dozens of books on color theory, spent countless hours every night mixing colors and making color wheels and color charts and eventually transcribing paintings of some of my favorite colorists, first in pastel and then in oils, and I made weekly visits to museums and galleries to study the color in great paintings first hand.
And then I started making paintings. Terrible paintings. Dozens and dozens of terrible paintings. But I kept painting and gradually, almost imperceptibly, my paintings got better. Now, more than fifteen years later, I'm pretty fluent in the language of color. I can look at any color and see it's component parts and, although challenging myself with complex color relationships that I've never seen before is an important part of my process – and I relish those challenges – I feel confident in my ability to control the color in my paintings and to achieve the effects that I want, none of which has anything to do with talent or natural ability to "get" color, but is the direct result of a refusal to accept a limitation and to put in as much work as was necessary in order to overcome it.
Color relationships are one of the most important aspects of my work and, really, the primary subject. I always think about the colors for a specific painting before I begin and my process (which I have detailed here in previous posts) involves mixing all of the colors for a painting before I begin to put anything on the canvas.
This painting began with the impulse to make an image that had "brown" as the principle color. (I put the word "brown" in quotations because I think of all colors in terms of their value, hue and saturation and the colors that we usually refer to as browns are really desaturated yellows, oranges and reds.) Of course, as I began mixing my colors, many of them refused to be desaturated and the oranges, reds and red violets defiantly asserted themselves, causing me to increase the saturation of the blues and yellows in order to maintain an overall harmony. The result, quite removed from what I had initially intended, is really a painting based on the triad of primary colors (yellow, red and blue). As an artist, it's important to be able to subjugate our need for control and allow the image's own unique personality to bloom. (The same could be said of parenting!) In the end, that cool green in the bottom section made a surprise appearance and pulled the whole thing together, essentially stealing the show from the primary colors. It's my favorite part of the painting!
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