Broken Colors

A warm grey wash of pigment and turpentine unlocks the white canvas, allowing the image locked in my head to escape. Touches of colors fade into the still fresh wash as I mark where shoulders will be. Another smudge of burnt sienna for her face & hair, hips, feet, and hands. So far, so good. Confident now, I open a conversation with my model.

The conversation builds a connection with her and I that is very important for mixing colors. The more enlightening the conversation, the richer the colors are. Which red in my box will do her justice, as I listen and trade ideas? I tend to look closer as I get to know who is posing for me.

Things like folds in a skirt cause problems for me because they seldom return to their same position after breaks. Sometimes they are better after a break and I spend time changing them. Doing nudes, I don’t have the folds to deal with. With nudes I have to think more about my brushwork. Too much brushwork for me takes away from the softness of a young lady, and I tend to prefer young ladies for my paintings. At the same time, too smooth a rendering of the nude is just not for me.

I like broken colors in my art. I can appreciate other artists' work for how they treat the nude. Some with rough, wild strokes showing passion, and others with tight renderings; all speak to me. Lately I have been pulling little color studies out and loosening them up with looser brush work. These little studies bring back conversations. One brought back the story of one model's journey of getting to America and learning English from classmates in her high school. Another color study reminded me how brave my models can be. One donated a kidney to her mother.

Painting is a process of looking and learning. Sometimes it is looking inside myself and finding a new person. "Why a nude?” is a question I ask myself and the answer is always in the painting itself. A painting of a girl stepping out of a shower, or standing on a scale checking her weight, are simple daily reasons for being nude. Watching her figure form out of the running wash on the canvas, hearing about the model’s adventures, like stealing her way to America, are all there in my art, and me, through the painting process.

The Color That Became A Star

Hunting for inspiration... what form will it come in I do not know. Light striking an old barn on a stormy day? A rooster in rich green grass? A beautiful model in the studio or simply seeing colors laid out on a palette? Some days inspiration finds us - other days we have to go hunting for it. Concepts stew in us, building slow over time, we feed them with values and lay them out in compositions. While we wait for them to mature, we do color studies and composition studies, or refine drawings. A dozen little color studies are always sitting around the studio reminding me there is a painting waiting in my head. Rushing a painting is not my thing, like a good bar of chocolate, I savor it.

Some paintings require the right reference, something we do not possess, in which case little studies are even more important. We never stop learning, we never stop understanding the world around us. Purple calls to us, wanting to be part of a painting of a summer storm and so we work it in. Colors, barely visible, wake up and call to us becoming the stars of a painting. Like a mystery movie, “who did it” is revealed when we finish. Greens and yellows star in a spring scene or a cherry blossom’s pink set off the new blue we wanted to try out. We plan and work out problems of composition only to have a color outperform our hard work on other aspects of a painting.