Color truth
 

Painters must come to the place where they can read color (values, intensity, and hue) at once. Perhaps, it helps to try to analize these aspects seperately - I can't remember ever doing that. When I see a color (before me, life painting) I see all aspects at once. My eye and mind read it all.

It's not unlike saying, "when you want to recognize a human being, you should consider the shape of the head, the hair color, the height, the skin color, the posture, the details of the features etc." None of us do that step by step. We consider all parts at once. Reading color is like that too. Doing this takes practice so that you can translate what you see to the world of pigment in your mind.

Tim:

Yes, it is possible to learn to paint that way. Certainly for some it will be easier than for others - it was not easy for me.

The thing is, when you compartmentalize things for a new artist, it really can help them get their mind around the concepts. I have seen a 48 year old flight attendant, who has never picked up a brush in her life, do a very detailed monochrome underpainting in a week when she was first taught about value and told to focus on just that.

If I may steal a line from the Bible: Clearly there are many paths to so great a truth...

On a related note
 

As an added note; Your values can be right and your color wrong. If the color is right, then all other parts are right;

Color:

A. Value
B. Hue
C. intensity

I think this is sometimes misunderstood.

Hi Michael,

I respect your point, but I've always wondered if that piece by piece method maybe makes it more complicated. As I say, when you see someone on the street, your mind uses numerous devices simultaneously to recognize (or dismiss as a stranger) that person. This is a learned trait. We can learn this trait in art too. I notice if I don't paint for 3 or 4 days my skill and speed at this "reading color" decreases.

Mix master
 

Going for the color directly is impractical, in my opinion, simply because it is impossible to duplicate nature in paint. You can't recreate the red of a rose in sunlight in paint. If the hue is correct then the value will be dark. If the value is correct then the hue will be bleached out.

What you perceive in reality is the result of additive color (light) mixtures while the colors you mix are the result of subtractive color (pigment) mixtures.

The key is to understand the relationships you see before you, and while maintaining them, ratio the colors and values down so that the relationships are recreated within the realm of pigment.

Ultimately you must choose between value and color. If you favor form then value comes first.

As a teacher, I have had great results teaching color mixing by having my students separate the three aspects of color: hue, value and chroma.

The greatest painters were also great scientists (objective observers who constanly strove to understand why the world appeared to them the way it did) and clever thinkers who never attempted to copy nature, but strove to enhance it instead. The choices they made, based on their analysis of nature, is what defines their creations as works of pure genius.

I disagree
 

No way, At least indoors you can nail both-if you try. Why choose one over the other. This work has both value and color right on.

Which
 

Which would you say I fudged on value or color. If you see it you can paint it. Sorolla did some pretty convincing paintings of wet red noses outside too.

Sargent
 

Sargent taught classes too and he said,"the harder a color is to read, the harder you must work to get it."

Truth or consequences?
 

Tim,

You are certainly entitled to your opinion but I really don't see any evidence that you have presented here that encourages me to change mine.

I express my views here not to try to change your mind but to offer the possibility of the existence of an alternate view to those perusing this Forum on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I still feel to interpret and not copy nature is the hallmark of all great art.

Sargent was a great artist but produced works, in my opinion, of uneven quality. Perhaps if Sargent had been able to first determine the hue, then mix the value and lastly adjust the chroma he may have avoided having to start so many paintings over and over. One sitter alone had documented being required to show up for 80 sittings. Sargent was, from what I can tell, a very instinctive painter.

William Paxton, on the other hand was a far more cerebral painter whose output was far more consistent, quality wise. Sargent at his best (Lady Agnew), is one of the most brilliant paintings I've ever seen (up close and personal) but I've seen many others that were real dogs.

If you are posting examples of your own work to make a point here, I hope your realize that you are inviting the possibility of having your work and not just your point of view questioned. If you want this type of interaction, perhaps posting in the critique section would be a more appropriate venue.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I believe that the great painters were keen observers of the world around them. I equated them to scientists since they were looking to uncover the mechanics of visual phenomena. Identifying a color by virtue of its hue, value and chroma is the basis of scientific color identification and by adopting this method of objective analysis artists can only enhance their own attempts to understand the world that appears before them. A nice side effect of this approach is that you begin to see the interrelationships between all mixes on your canvas, a very useful tool indeed.

I would encourage those who agree with your opinion, or those who are interested in pursuing the possibility of its authenticity, to sign up for one of your workshops and explore your methods first hand.

Briefly
 

Marvin, my paintings hang beside Andrew Wyeth and Pino and there are exposed to pretty tough day to day comparisons from art buyers. I can bear some critiques from this Forum. But you said an artist has to choose between value and color. I'd like to know why. Which does your Paxton choose? Which did Vermeer choose? How about Bouguereau? To me, they got both rich color and correct values.

I too, think Sunday readers should get accurate information. You said a painter must choose; why? A good painter can paint what is before him - if he can see it - it can be painted. Why must anyone limit themselves? Electing to do so is a different discussion. By the way, my initial point was that an artist does not have to analyze each part, one piece at a time. Each aspect of color is precisely what comprises that very color. I'm just asking for a short to the point reply. Brevity is the soul of wit.

I'm not going to bother defending Sargent.

Hi
 

I find this debate very interesting, and certainly it is a compliment to the level of accuity that professionals reach, and is a priviledge for us (not there yet) to learn from. Please allow me to ask a question of you -

It seems to me in reading this that I am leaning more towards what Tim believes. I say this for two reasons:

1.) What we see doesn't really exist, as far as it is our brain interpreting information. For example, thank goodness for persistence of vision, or else we would "see" nothing but millions of separate frames of information. Marcel Duchamps' "Nude Decending Staircase", judged from this perspective, is more "real" than, say any Ingres. So as painters we are toying with visual sensory nerves, and should be possible to achieve our "trickery" in both value in tone - look at Chuck Close as a raw example in my opinion.

2.) I find that there is a level of cerebral "scientific expertise" that one may actually want to avoid, as the closer you may achieve it, it is to the sacrifice of other dynamics that are involved in portraiture. To me Sargent is exceptional, because he is human, and the fact that his works shows both mastery and fallibility is the common denominator of both him AND of his subjects. No one is perfect, and no one should be.

On the other hand, I it find ironic that Tim uses as an example a still life, and not a human being.

What I'd like to ask is, in the context of value/color, how does one capture a subject's spirit?

Thanks for your consideration of this idea.
Linda

Debate able
 

Painting exists on two levels as does everything else in life. According to Eastern Philosophy these two opposite yet complimentary extremes are called yin and yang. Every thing in life is a function of balance. We light fire to stave off the cold of winter. We go swimming to counter the heat of summer.

In painting the two extremes we try to balance are the physical property of the paint (the physical) and the spirit of the artist (the ethereal). If either one is in short supply the other suffers. There have been many debates about the validity of "modern vs classical" and I hope this thread doesn't degrade into that. It's a horse we've more than beaten to death.

The point I would like to make is that the greatest painters had an abundance of technical ability which allowed them the freedom to express their spirituality.

In this regard I would argue that Duchamp was far less successful than Ingres (aren't we all) in either respect.

I personally think it is foolhardy to rationalize that too much technique will somehow give you a better opportunity to operate on a higher artistic plane. I've yet to see that wish come true.

However, I believe that to rely only on one's technical ability may only get you half way there but without the facility to express your ideas in paint without compromise, you can't get there at all.

The mastery of painting cannot take place if one tries to copy or match what is before them. Pigments offer a limited scope in their ability to capture the world around us. Value-wise the brilliance of the sun compared to the shadow accents of velvet in a dark cave are literally thousands of times greater than the range between black and white paint. No pigment can match the brilliance of a scarlet rose in sunlight.

To recreate the sensation of said rose, one would have to subdue the colors around it, if indeed the goal was to replicate its brilliance. In order to paint the luminosity of a lit match, I would darken the values around it. How can a fire seem aglow if I were to depict the value of a white shirt with very light or white paint. If I want to appear slim I hang out with Sumo wrestlers.

So trying to match a color to what is in front of us is impossible unless we work in a limited range of values, hues and chromas which conform to the properties inherent to paint.

"My" Paxton, Bouguereau, and Vermeer chose to depict value at the sacrifice of copying the exact colors around them. So do Pino and Wyeth for that matter. Does this mean that they chose to ignore color. Obviously not. They created beautiful color effects because of the arrangements of color relationships and not by copying the colors exactly.

Sorolla on the other hand went for the color at the expense of his values and sometimes his paintings have areas that are visually confusing.

A camera attempts to copy the colors and values it sees and translates this to film. The lightest areas get bleached out and/or the darkest areas clog up with black. The range of photo paper is very similar to that of paint.

Living in New York and going to the auction previews at Christie's and Sotheby's I've seen over one hundred Bouguereau paintings. His flesh tones are not realistic at all, if you analyze them stroke for stroke. But they are incredibly lifelike by virtue of the interplay between his color notes. Paxton's skin tones glow due to the same phenomena. Paxton came as close as anyone in recreating the look of accurate color and accurate values but never copied. This is "trickery" of color and tone at the highest level.

As a teacher I feel it is my responsibility to remember what it is like to not know how to do whatever it is I'm trying to teach. To be able to teach how to solve the problem at hand, one must start from the position of not knowing, just like the student. Then we discover the answer together.

Obviously the goal is to mix the color we desire and if we can shoot from the hip all the better, but the best way to learn anything is to break it down into digestible parts not trying to hip shoot.

Be it color or spirit what you see is what you paint. You can't paint what you are not looking for, be it color, spirit or value. Capturing one's essence is only possible when you are sensitive enough to see it. You can't paint what you don't know is there. Too many are happy to just paint the features well.

My own personal definition of a portrait is a soul with a person painted around it. You can be the judge as to whether I achieved that end in this detail from my portrait of Julia. http://www.fineartportrait.com/julia.html

Color note
 

Moseying back to the mechanics of color matching . . .

Most often when I hear someone speaking of getting the

It would be terrific if every artist were wired to see, evaluate, and reproduce an image instantaneously. Linda and Tim seem to be advocating this more intuitive painting method.

But this seems familiar territory to anyone with grade school aged children. For the last few decades, schools have been teaching the "look-say" or "whole word" method of reading. The students have been taught to see, memorize, and recognized words at a glance. The opposing teaching method is phonics. In this method, the student is taught to sound out the letters or letter combinations. This has been a HUGE battle in schools as the whole word proponents battle the phonics crowd.

It also seems entirely unnecessary. The fact is that some learn better by working in Tim's manner (whole word), while some learn better with Marvin's method (phonics).

As a teacher, I agree with Marvin that the easiest way to impart the basic knowledge of putting a painting (portrait) together is by breaking the parts down into digestible chunks.

Finally, I remember John Sanden in a discussion about what was more important, drawing, color or value. I never found that it was necessary to sacrifice one element for the other, and have separately studied drawing (ateliers), color (the Cape School) and value (early Cedric Egeli).

I can tell you this, if the color is wrong but the value is right, the painting will still work. If the color is right but the value is wrong, the painting will fall apart.

Peggy

I have to agree with Peggy.

Saying that any of these factors--drawing (position, shape), value, color--are more important than the other is assigning qualitative "value" (value in a different sense) to factors that are essentially neutral. They all interact and support each other. Beyond that, saying that seeing and translating as a whole, vs. considering each factor independently, is a pointless discussion. The key is to find whatever verbal or intuitive construct that works for you. Painting while simultaneously asking oneself,"Am I seeing these things holistically or as separate factors?" is like playing a good game of tennis and simultaneously thinking, "I am playing a good game of tennis." Who cares what's going on in there, if it works for you?

And I also have found that beginning painters seem to get "value" better if it's broken out separately, because most of them come into painting so preoccupied with hue and chroma to the exclusion of all else.

I will reveal my own bias, though, and reiterate what Ray Kinstler has always said: a color isn't right until its value is right. And my own experience mirrors Peggy's--if the colors sing but the values (the mechanics for describing light) are squirrely, the realistic effect and overall cohesion are pretty drastically undermined.

Speaking for the "others"...
 

However different, this road or that road, so long as the debate continues at a friendly rate, I am learning a great deal from both sides...well, (Peggy) from all three sides now.

This is exactly what I come to the forum for.

I would have to say this is one of the most "color"ful conversations with the greatest "value." What do "hue" think?

Here's a point
 

If anywhere a picture is worth a thousand words it's in these discussions. (This debate is drifting from my point but it is getting deep, informative and fun, so I'll play.) I honestly am honored to argue with an informed group like this!


This idea of learning to see and nailing color as you see it is not unrelated to the manner you choose to paint. I try to fit what I see as closely as I can as fast as I can. I usually must try several times but each time I get closer. Form is defined by light flowing over it. Hard light will bleach color out. Example below by Anders Zorn.

Soft light
 

With soft light-more color (this is not that complicated) Bouguereau...

Yet
 

Both are believable and yet I know that Zorn unified his work with a very limited palette and ignored many tangent colors.

Here's Sargent with even less light. This soft warm glow allowed very rich color. As we all know, he painted on this 12 minutes at a time for two summers, every pleasant evening, slowly getting precisely the colors he saw. For me it gets no better (although this is a regrettable jpeg.)

For me
 

I simply have never seen the worth of doing underpainting and slowly finding color. True color must have the right values, chroma and intensity. As I said earlier, choosing to ignore and being selective is a different argument. That's a discussion about selection/editing. I would never try to paint a soul. Souls and spirits are mostly invisible to me. Gosh, skin is tough enough.

This was a quick sketch I posted elsewhere, done alla prima with warm light. Someone asked about my posting a still life. Color exists in landscapes and still lifes as well as in portraits and we all know what Sargent said about that: "To paint a good portrait you must learn to paint everything, lest you be called a mannerist."

Tim--

Apart from the merits of this discussion, I have to say thanks for the Zorn. I hadn't see this one.

God, what a painter.

Best--TE

Underpainting
 

Tim,

The very reason I like underpainting is the layering of value and hue. Using say, a cool light and a warm dark to register values correctly, then "hanging" the color over it with scumble and glaze seems to be the "way" I paint best. It's the way I "see" my paintings.

To be clear
 

Let me be more clear.

My point is not about method as much as analysis. We can see values and hues and intensity at once (and do everyday, all the time). There is no reason we must consider a subject any differently than real life. Underpainting (and method) is really another discussion.

Ultimately, we get the right color (hopefully). Some artists just paint more directly than others, just as some will draw everything out beforehand. Bouguereau did that and how can I find fault with his results?

Great point, Tim, and a truly great still life!

Tim, do you underpaint? (I don't mean to get personal.) :)

Lon
 

I do on complex and demanding subjects on occasion.

Tim,

I am glad to see a successful painter who just paints what he sees, and states it so. I know it is OK to do it other ways. But why? It seems so simple to me.

I ain't never seen the need for underpaints. I never worn the con-founded things.

Tickled pink
 

You obviously don't need the analysis to see the world in front of you. However since the point is to interpret the world onto a flat plane and create the illusion of dimensionality there is obviously more than merely copying what's before your eyes.

The best painters have always combined their observations of naturalistic phenomena and incorporated these to enhance the effects they were trying to convey in the scene before them. It's been stated many times that a great painter paints not what he sees but what he knows. I teach my students not to merely copy what's in front of their eyes but to cajole, tickle, tweak, soothe, underplay and exaggerate to achieve their ends. That, in my opinion, is the art of painting.

To successfully "copy" the world in front of you, you can pick up a camera and snap away.

Flat
 

Too much of what I see called realistic painting is way too flat. I want depth. I still argue that painting something like the Grand Canyon helps an artist to paint a face. Stuff is stuff. Most portrait painters before 1900 could and did paint everything. Many today don't. Which era produced the better painters?

I can spot parts of most paintings where the master tried to fix nature. It's the weak spots with bad color or the parts out of drawing.

Wiles: richly done, good values and color

In the 17th century artists were specialists, one did still-life, another portraits, another did landscapes.

About painting what you see in front of you... A face painted by Rembrandt looks totally natural in it's colouring. However, when you look at the faces of the people in the museums and you compare them with the painted faces, you see that colouring can be totally different. Incorporated in the method of working were many codes to how to paint a face. It's not just painting what you see. There was a 'codification' of the face and when they painted someone they applied this codification to someones personal features.

What someone's method of painting is is related to someones' beliefs in colour-theory etcetera, that's why Marvin's work looks different than the work of Tim. I can appreciate the work of both painters.

Peter

You're absolutely right, Peter, on both the specialization and codification points. These are among the most notable and interesting issues in art history.

The portrait you show above is a great example of the subtle changes that a great artist makes to enhance the look of his picture. Both the arms have been lowered in value so as to not take the viewers attention away from the head of the sitter. Furthermore the background value has been lowered for the same reason. The arms are both closer to the light source than the head and should be lighter than depicted. The background is too close to the figure for such a dramatic fall off of light thus enhancing the illusion of depth in the painting.

My first realization as to the quest to go beyond reality was when viewing the Van Dyke exhibition at the National Gallery in D.C. about a dozen years ago. I noticed that the figures in the paintings were more alive and more dimensional than the "real" people viewing them.

I think this technique of subtle manipulation to enhance reality is not very often spoken about because when it is so artfully done it is barely noticeable. This is far different than the heavy handed attempts to fake information not understood by lesser artists.

Each semester I take my students to the Met and guide them on a tour showcasing multiple examples of how artists have enhanced their paintings. I now incorporate a slide show along with my workshops highlighting these same paintings.

Understanding the mindset of great painters is the first step in becoming one yourself.

I don't believe there is a single Rembrandt-painting that could be staged with actors and look the same if you took a picture of it.

(I'm sorry to be totally un-original in my choice of favorite artists. ;) )

Peter

Hi Marvin,

If possible, maybe in this thread or in a new one, could you give us a few examples of the paintings which you find interesting in this matter?

Would like to see them.

Greetings,
Peter

Peter
 

Peter, I'm trying to recall where that Rembrandt feller lived. I do remember hearing someone mention some other pretty good painters from that same land of old too...it's on the tip of my tongue.

Tim
 

shht... Don't tell anyone!!!
It was supposed to be a secret...

:D

Peter