Mood:
happyTopic: art in progress
This is the latest painting I am working on. It looks rather scary in the first stages. What you are looking at is just an underpainting. I pick 4 colors and paint with them. Naples yellow green, naples yellow red, serves green and indanthrene blue. Those sure aren't colors any art teacher would say to start a painting with.
I am just trying to understand where the light and dark colors will go. And since I am working with photographs (magazine pictures of real clothing or digital camera pictures of feet, facial expression and the Chinese table) as well as a drawing of the entire composition, I am more worried about place of shape than color of shape.
The girl peeling an apple is wearing an outfit designed by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton.
Her top will be, as Jacobs intended, a sky blue with a white ruffle. The skirt is a hunter's red with black puff netting at the bottom.
Why paint with green and blue when the objective is a red skirt? Good question. All I know is that red alone would be boring. There should be a lot of change in any one solid panel of cloth. Oil paint is often translucent and what you put underneath will receive light. Green will twist that light and then send it bouncing back through the red to your eyes.
If I just mixed green and red right there on the canvass the resulting color is a rather exciting brown. I think. But if each color dries, one on top of the other, then you start getting from your color, what I call, "the sensation of velvet". Velvet is a pile of fibers that capture light like other cloth cant. Velvet is not flat, somehow, it gives us visual clues about that.
Human skin has layers of translucence that light passes through and back. Skin gives its own clues that it is alive.
I never start a painting with the "right" colors. In the end I promise that you will say, "of course the skirt is red". But if I've been successful there will be something delicious about the skirt. Delicious paint? You bet. At some point words start to fail to describe and we pull in description from a cross sensation - taste in the case of delicious. Or velvet paint - a touch sensation.
It is exactly the use of opposite or wrong colors that teases the mind to start talking in terms of nonsense and paradox.
This painting has a long journey ahead before it is finished. I can only work in tiny increments. And I don't know if the sale price can reflect the time and numerous mental choice contained within it's 11"x14" boundary. But this is often the lot of the artist.
Posted by dignifyme
at 6:36 AM EST
Updated: Friday, 11 November 2005 1:28 PM EST
