An art studio as an art school

After some long hours of work (around seven to eight a day) a thought came to my mind. By spending so much time every day painting I start seeing my studio as a school. There is so much to be learned and unlearned from it every time you start working. Everyday I feel like a student learning from some exciting new discovery Ive made on my own. I enjoy sharing these personal discoveries in this blog with anyone interested.

Im aware that most of these discoveries are not really discoveries in the sense that someone else might have found out about it centuries before I did . This reminds me of those old history books that tell us Christopher Columbus "discovered" the Americas like no one else lived in the "New World" (New for the Europeans).An artist sensible enough to history will question these cultural assumptions. In an artist studio, the painter is challenged by constant unquestioned assumptions and rules that the painter must confront every time he or she is in front of his or her work. 

 

Going back to a few studio "discoveries" that I wish to share:

Not long ago I had a color palette placed right beside me. After some time twisting and turning to pick up some colors from my palette on  to my brushes I decided to change position and have the palette in front of me instead. This might be an obvious practice to many painters but something easy to forget with time and that was precisely my case. This is the reason why I think many of us should teach, in order to keep good studio habits fresh and alive by means of example. By keeping colors right in front of your painting, painting becomes a more direct and immediate activity.

The whole idea of creating a color palette is to facilitate the painting process, to paint faster and more effectively create and match colors. By placing a large glass or plexi glass palette in front and between the painting and myself I keep a good distance from my work. This allows me to see the whole while I work on the details. The problem with working too closely is that one looses focus of the whole picture and everything ends up in dis-harmony in the process.

I would say that an arms length is a proper distance with small works. I remember using long sticks attached to my brushes when working larger formats. Not only was I able to "see the whole picture" while I worked. My painting was even looser, more expressive and fluid. The Mexican muralists  like Diego Rivera and Siqueiros often used to work like this with very long brushes.

Something else I have learned or evolved to do in my studio is to keep fewer brushes when I work. Not only do I do this to spend less time cleaning and avoiding having to deal with dirty brushes but also I found that most of the time I ended up using seven brushes. These seven brushes are photographed below

Now I use just seven brushes that do most of the job. I also use a small rag or piece of cloth to wipe out mistakes or colored glazes and a palette knife. I use my fingers as well. Many painters from the past like Leonardo and Titian were into the habit of using their fingers to paint. The more direct one can handle paint the more control one has over it. Just make sure you are not using toxic pigments and make sure you don't bite your nails and wash your hands regularly. The seven brushes I use are composed of three small long liners, three medium sized filbert brushes and one relatively large round brush. Numbers and sizes vary according to brand but all of these are usually taklon synthetic or natural sable. Ive been surprised of how long my cheap brushes have survived and I suspect it has to do with what I do with them after every use. I dip them in olive oil and leave them resting over my working table. Olive oil is a very slow drying oil. In fact it does not seem to dry at all therefore not allowing paint in the brushes to dry. Of course when you use these brushes again you must make sure you wipe the olive oil off of them. Otherwise your painting will not dry either.

 The script, liner or rigger brush (all different names for this tiny long haired brush) are among my favorite brushes. With these I manage to get most of the minute detail in my small format and retablo work.
 I normally use three of these brushes at a time. A 20/0 a 6/0 and a 0. One will carry the dark colors, one the middle tones and the third lighter colors. I wipe out the paint off the brush when I go from one color to another.

I use number 2, 4 and  6 filbert brushes to paint larger areas within my composition. The same as with the liner brushes, I keep three for three values: light, middle and dark tones or values. The larger round brush I occupy to blend edges which is so important in this kind or realistic old master rendering. One must keep lines to a minimum in order to convey a convincing sense of atmosphere and what Leornardo Da Vinci would have called  "sfumato" (foggy or airy blending). I shall write more extensively about these terms in future entries. For now what I find relevant to mention is that good quality brushes are surely best to anything but a painting depends much more on how you use your tools than on what kind of tools you use. You may use crappy materials and produce masterpieces. Its how you use them what really matters. That is why I do not favor any particular kind of brand of oil paints or brushes. I would advice try them all if you can and stick to whatever suits you best. I have my personal preferences of course but these have changed in recent years.

On the photo above you may appreciate how Im blending my painted contour lines in order to maintain some tonal unity and  the illusion of an atmospheric"sfumato". The painting Ive been working on is my own version of the three graces re contextualized with the themes of consumerism, corn production and genetically manipulated organisms. I have borrowed Mayan  glyphs and classical poses and combined them with contemporary issues. It is titled "The survival of the Graces" . I shall post a photo of the work once it is completed. I wish to thank all of those who have commented on my blog and facebook. I thank you all for your support and are more than happy to receive your comments, suggestions or questions. I'll keep blogging every week and soon will deal more with conceptual issues which Im sure many of you will appreciate reading.

In search of an Ideal palette

In my last blog entry I explored a closed controlled oil  painting palette in a linear method. That is to say that colors were mixed horizontally across the palette from left to right or right to left on four rows. I have limited my palette on purpose from four to seven colors and there is a reason for this.  According to Euphrosyne Doxiadis on her book "The Mysterious Fayum Portraits the great painters from antiquity such as Apelles, Aetion, Melanthius and Nicomachus used only four colors for their paintings. White, Yellow ochre, Red Earth and black seem to be the preferred color palette not only for these great masters of antiquity but also for the lesser known authors of the surviving Fayum portraits found in Hellenic Egypt. It is amazing to see how well executed these portrait are and with so little. These have never ceased to capture my imagination. Below an example of one of the portraits I am referring to.

Fayum Portrait of a woman Louvre Museum , Paris

Our modern color theory teaches us that we need only the three primary colors (red, blue and yellow) to make any other color. Even though many of these portraits have traces of other exotic pigments, most of them are painted with a four-color palette.  One might think this palette will limit the range of possible mixtures creating a monotonous painting but to the contrary, the range of colors is maximized and at the same time color harmonies are even richer. The color black obtained from soot or carbon is a much cooler black than other blacks. Also known as Vine black, when white is added it becomes a cool bluish black.   

Classical Tetracomy

 Other paintings and mosaics found in Pompey  follow this principle which is also a reflection of the fourfold world view shared by Greek and Roman cultures. The world was divided in four cardinal directions, as well as four seasons. In the diagram below we find an interesting study of the four bodily fluids or humours according to the classical tradition. Ancient medicine was based on this system. What I find particularly interesting about this as a painter is how colors were believed to correspond to these four seasons, cardinal points or humours. The colors are always the same: white, black, yellow and red. Even though Phlegm is represented here with a light blue triangle, it was usually associated with white.

The Greeks were not the only ones to believe in the sacred tetrachromy composed of red, yellow, black and white. On the other side of the Atlantic the Mayan and Aztec civilizations held the same four colors to be the most basic colors of the Universe. It is truly amazing how much one can stretch the color spectrum with Lead White, Vine Black, Red Ocher and Yellow Ocher. It is said that Rembrandt Van Rijn used to work on such a limited palette. Specially if the painter is specializing in the painting the human figure, you probably will not need much more than this. Im aware this makes no sense to most contemporary painters who have access to such an infinite variety of synthetic vivid pigments available in the market. But following the same modern premise of "less is more" one can find  beauty and truth in limiting size, amount and variety. This may well apply to food in many cases.

Mayan Calendar

Kala Chakra Mandala

Astrological calendar

One may find truth in many shapes and colors. Ive seen perfection embodied in a circle. From the Tibetan Mandala to the Zodiac wheel, from the planets to the atoms, nature has a favored the globe and the circle over and over and this is also reflected in the sacred symbols of many ancient cultures. Going from the four-fold world to the circle has taken me to the next experiment in studio practice. Why not create a four-fold color circular palette? Would this be the ideal palette? The linear closed and controlled palette has its cons. One cannot be as flexible with mixtures and make new ones up along the way as with the  traditional oval shaped open palette. As I mentioned on my previous blog entry, the latter also has its cons as in many occasions it becomes chaos with unstructured muddy colors running wild around the surface. So why not have both palettes come together in one?  Here's what I found out from my little experiment.

Four-fold cross like  color palette

The human eye has an organic tendency to look at everything in a circular motion. This might be the reason why we feel more attracted to rounded shapes like oval shaped palettes which are favorites among art students and professional painters alike. Square or rectangular linear row like palettes can become constraining patterns too boring for the mind so I decided to make a variation on it using the same seven colors I always use. I could have done the experiment with four colors but I believe seven will give up more color variation and richness to this equation. A few days ago a kept thinking about the Sun and our solar system and an idea hit me. Why not have Titanium white at the center of my system. It is pure light and the most important color of all because it is the sum of all colors. This served as an inspiration for my new palette. Light after all is the center and main protagonist of painting.

Our Solar System

First of all I establish the center of my Plexiglas palette and have plenty of Titanium Oil color placed there.

I place the color Raw Umber on my extreme left side of my palette. Raw Umber is one of the best colors to start with in an oil painting because it dries very fast and serves perfectly well as an underpainting with a neutral greenish brown that becomes grayish when mixed with white and that is not distracting to the eye.

I add a few drops of Clove Oil to my Raw Umber color and then proceed to create a  short value scale mixing it with white. I have four middle values between pure white and pure raw umber.

 Vertically above my white color I have Blue black or Indigo color place and mixed together in four middle tone values with white. This color can be very blue or very gray depending on your principal mixture and departing point. Ultramarine blue with Ivory black or Indigo blue seems to be a good choices but make sure to add some clove oil drops to make sure it dries slowly on your palette. Ive noticed dryness in the environment have a serious effect on your palette. That is why I sometimes add more than one drop of Clove Oil. When humidity is high in the environment one drop would suffice.

I then Add Yellow Ocher on the middle part of my next horizontal left to right row. Ivory black will be placed at the extreme right side and mixed with yellow ocher to create a darker version of this color. Yellow ocher can be mixed with white to have some lighter versions of the Yellow Ocher. I have noticed that Yellow Ocher chromatic qualities are enhanced by adding a little of Indian Yellow to the mixture. This is one of my favorite colors specially when glazing.

Vertically below the white center I added Cadmium Red Light and Alizarin Crimson with enough space between them and white. The red don't require much clove oil to retard the drying time. They are slow drying pigments already, specially Alizarin Crimson. Still I add a drop to each so I can work with these colors for an extended period of time (about a week).

 Once this is done I have  each scale of the yellow row mixed with each scale of the red row. creating a fifth leg to the cross shaped color palette. This leg has now created a nice flesh color in different values. I do the same with each leg or row of my palette creating a beautiful color asterisk  shape (*)

The spaces between become open spaces where one can mix glazes and additional colors. In the end of the painting session my closed controlled palette looked more like a psychedelic color wheel than a relatively clean linear closed palette. It is like having the best of both palette systems and working circularly around the white. The results in my paintings were quite impressive as well. I shall soon document these once they are completed. For now I want to conclude that no matter how many colors you use, how is the shape of your palette or in what order you work, make it meaningful. Have your palette be a part of your philosophy. Make the process relevant to your way of thinking. I find myself thinking in crosses, septenary, four-fold systems and circles. These numbers and forms seem to re-connect me with the origins of the Universe. Buddhist monks meditate on sacred Mandalas. As a painter I find myself in a trance like state when mixing colors in my palette. These are the mysteries that make art so interesting and imbue it with deep mysticism.

The evolution of an oil painting color palette

In recent days I have been engaged on various projects in my studio. Most of these projects consist of oil paintings on canvas and wood panels of different sizes. For all of these I use a consistent palette with predictable results that enables me to keep the work under an relatively speedy and ordered process. By having all of my colors premixed on my palette I avoid wasting time between focusing on a composition and mixing colors. By just concentrating on picking up colors from the palette with my brush and adding them to my composition, the process of painting becomes more direct, engaging and less distracting.

First of all I want to emphasize as I have done previously in demos and classes that there is no "one" way of doing art and the reader and art student should assume that this formula may work for some forms of painting and may not be well suited for other forms of painting. In my case, it has proven to be the most effective when it comes to small and medium sized highly detailed and well rendered realistic oil paintings on canvas and panel. I have worked with this palette on a few occasions for bigger works but this required using more painting mixed on a larger palette.

In an older post on this blog I already mentioned the importance of the use of this palette. It is called a "closed" palette because it leaves little or no space for mixing more colors once it is completed. An open palette is what most painters learn to use and use it freely mixing colors without any specific order. A traditional "open" palette is composed of an "spectrum" place where one adds the color, usually on the outer rim of the palette and the "atrium"  (place where one mixes colors together, usually at the center of this palette.) This is the palette that most artists I know currently use. I myself worked with it for some time and it was the first palette with which I learned to paint much to my own frustration. One thing is for sure, it has been the most popular and preferred palette in history. Of course this doesn't mean its the best palette we can use.

 "Open" oval shaped palette  v.s. "closed" rectangle shaped palette

As the term "open" implies, this is a painters palette that allows you to mix new colors at any time while painting and even though one may follow a specific order from values to chromatic intensity, it is a very flexible palette, allowing certain chaos to reign in it. It is a wonderful palette to use and in some works I still find myself making use of it. But some it has some problems. These problems may give a hard time for some painters who are looking for order and structure not only for their ideas but for their colors as well. 

Many of my most disastrous paintings have been produces by the "open" palette. First I found myself trapped with many odd mixtures I could not replicate once the colors dried. Also I found it quite easy to break with tonal  and chromatic unity using a wide range of colors on an "open" palette. I remember giving up painting for a while and going back to drawing after feeling frustrated with the chaotic  muddy mixture of colors I had created on my palette. Then I studied under Rose Urbina a professional portrait artist who had studied and followed the tradition of John Singer Sargent. She introduced me into using the "closed" palette for a portrait. Pre-mixing all of these colors on my palette took over an hour. Very boring after a while but the results of it made every minute of this portrait painting worth it.The idea was to have as many value scales of strips as possible of every color one used on the painting allowing more richness in light and darkness of each color. By having  white mixed with black and all the grays in between on a horizontal strip of the palette, one could mix these with the different reds below, graying and de-saturating these in turn. The "closed" palette did limit a bit my color selection but in turn it added more richness to my values and values (light and darkness in colors) has been the major concern of the great European masters from the Renaissance and Baroque.

My studio setup left to right: color palette, laptop and easel with painting

Over time I experimented over many different surfaces and used many palettes but have returned once more to this "closed" palette. at the end of each painting session I have evaluated the creative process analyzing everything from the brushes and colors I use to my palette and the way I arrange and mix my colors. If one is aware of this and is willing to get rid of bad habits and willing to spend more money on better art supplies, it should be no surprise that the work in turn should improve. I shall write more about these issues in future posts but here I have turned my attention towards my palette.

7 color palette

Here's my most recent palette photographed with the seven colors I use identified. I have used only Raw Umber mixed with white with 8 value scales between these two colors. This is my first strip

On my second strip I have mixed Ivory black with Yellow Ocher having at least three or four values in between and from Yellow Ocher to white, four values in between. Then on the lower strip I have mixed Alizarin Crimson with Cadmium Red Light having at least two to three variations in between and from Cadmium Red to White mixing at least four value scales. The last value strip is composed of a bluish black mixed gradually with white. The bluish black may be indigo blue or Ultramarine blue mixed with Ivory black. A drop or two of "oil of cloves" may be added to each of the seven colors. This will  extend the drying time of the oil paint allowing you to work on a painting for about a week instead of a day or two without using the clove oil. The palette is a clear Plexiglas 18" x 24" over a cardboard painted gray. The neutral gray ground will give you a correct perception of your true colors while the Plexiglas being a nonabsorbent surface will keep the paint wet for a longer time and it is also easier to clean with a palette knife.  As one may see in the picture colors may be mixed between the horizontal value scales I have described creating a  much more complex diversity of colors. A "closed" palette like this one will enable you to paint  human figures, animals and landscapes with rich values and in chromatic proximity to the work of the "old masters" who did not use a wide range of bright colors like most painters use today . In no way it should limit your imagination to have a limited color palette but on the contrary give free reign to it and total freedom to concentrate on your own compositions.  If you enjoy the colors of Leonardo, Caravaggio and other great painters from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, you may wish to consider using a color palette similar to this one.