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Ground color
Hi Jean,
What I meant by ground color is something like the color of the underpainting, but the term ground refers to the oil ground or "gesso" one uses to prime the surface to be painted. It looked to me like this painting is done from a white ground color. I could be wrong, in which case the relationships of the more superficial layers of paint don't seem to be reacting/relating to the ground or starting color. This could be from using exclusively opaque titanium white, but judging from what looks like a moderate to thin paint layer, I would bet that white sits underneath.
Once when I was visiting Rubens' house in Antwerp, I came to drool in front of an enormous painting posterity had left for us visitors in what Peter Paul had used as his studio. Only after a few minutes did I realize that the entire bottom four feet of the picture was achieved leaving something like 70% of the ground color exposed, a kind of very warm reddish-brown. This extraordinary painting had demonstrated for me the potential of ground color relationships (not to mention those multiplied by careful underpainting).
I think you would find a lot of pleasure working on a reddish ground and allowing your paint layers to vary in their opacity. You may want to try different oils such as linseed/stand mixed with damar varnish. There are also many prefab mixtures, and you may use one already to make the paint a smoother consistency. With this project identify pigments that are more transparent and couple their effect with a thinning-w/oil. You could consider this a kind of extended underpainting process, and then for those opaque layers, apply them as economically as possible. Also experiment with how they react to the thinning with oil treatment.
I hope this is helpful and clear as I am really such the beginner with technical writing. Please let me know of your further success.
Brian
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