Primary Colors

[Douglas Drenkow]

Fascinating!

[Jim Riley]

Doug,

The other possibility is that the artist intended to have blue or green shades. Take a look at Bouguereau's Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Gardner and the two paintings that follow on page 3 of this website: http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2...ouguereau2.asp It might also be possible that the artist you noticed were attempting to do the same and had the results suffer from the possibilities that Karin noted.

[Douglas Drenkow]

With all due respect to Mssr. Bouguereau (who is obviously very talented), his Miss Gardner looks green, goulish, and ghastly to me.

I understand that if there are cool colored surfaces in the environment, highlights will tend to be cool colored; but any green will be brought out in contrast with the reds of the fleshtones.

Miss Gardener's green almost looks like a yellowing of the oil over a bluish shadow (although the white is pretty white and not yellowed, so that's probably not the case).

"Maternal Adoration", on page 3 of the Bougereau site, and "Seated Bather", on page 2 of the site, show blue shadows of the type I don't like -- the bather looks positively corpselike.

The example that always comes to mind is the neck of Helen in the classic work "The Abduction of Helen" by Guido Reni...

http://www.calliope.free-online.co.uk/abduct/pic20.htm

...I've got an even better picture at home, in my little book "Treasures of the Louvre", and the neck looks like it is made of steel, compared to the alabaster face and rosy cheeks of the lady.

I've seen paintings by Masters that were not completed; and in the unglazed areas, the underpaintings show through the same -- blue-black-gray shadows -- not an effect of an under layer becoming more visible as an upper layer becomes more transparent over time ("Pentimento", Italian for "repentance").

Fortunately, many underpaintings were done with white and burnt umber, for more "organic" shadows. The only bluish shadows I've seen on actual human beings have been in black beards of men or in rooms with blue walls.

To me, blue shadows on flesh are the realm of abstract art -- in which primary colors, not subtle tints, tones, and shades, are more the rule.

[Karin Wells]

The Old Masters understood that shadows are meant to be warm - and they painted them that way. I suspect that you are talking about the halftone (where light meets shadow) that is cool and the "blueish" or cool underpainting is allowed to show through. Quite frankly, I love that look when it is gently done....

[Douglas Drenkow]

In the example I cited...

http://www.calliope.free-online.co.uk/abduct/pic20.htm

...the halftones on the neck are gray, turning into the black of the shadows -- an interesting effect, but not a realistic rendering of living flesh.

In fact, gray halftones have often been used in contrast with reddish to indicate dead bodies, typically that of Christ, as in this work by Rubens...

http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/o1047.html

...note how the red blood of life has spilled from his wounds (and how the trauma is killing his mother, her face being drained of blood vis a vis her companions).

Art, of course, is always a matter of personal taste -- and I, too, also appreciate even grayish halftones when not taken to extremes -- but to my mind some of the most beautiful fleshtones were rendered by Boucher, as in his "Diana Leaving Her Bath" (unfortunately yellowed over time).

I have attached a detail scanned (in Fair Use, for comment and criticism) from a book -- the magnification is so great that you can begin to see the individual dots of (CMYK) ink (as I saw once at enormous magnification on a banner at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art): Boucher's hallmark "peaches and cream" complexions made use of almost the entire spectrum, with yellow predominating in the (sunny) highlights, red in the (rosy) halftones, and -- yes -- blue in the (relatively cool) shadows.

The primary colors again!

Although of course, still in mixtures -- even the warmest of brown shadows contain some blue, or else they'd be orange; and so forth.

And as you pointed out, Karin, by subsituting blacks for blues, the effects of colors are relative, so very dependent upon their surrounding colors.

But that's why I started this "primary colors" thread (now fairly "tattered"): I wanted to know if I was "off base" by staying with the old "red, blue, yellow" mindset -- if we don't know the elements, we can't compose good designs.

[Douglas Drenkow]

If you'd like to see how old paintings looked when they were created, before their oil and varnish yellowed, try looking at them through a light blue filter (such as an 80A photographic filter, used on cameras with standard daylight film when taking pictures under incandescent lights).

I tried it with my book of Rembrandts and voila! The fleshtones became just that much fleshier!

But poor old Mona Lisa: She's so cracked and yellowed now that even that trick didn't work for me -- his contemporaries said that Da Vinci painted her fleshtones so realistically that it looked like you could just reach out and touch her.

Color -- the artist's best friend and worst enemy.

[Karin Wells]

Aaaaaargh! This is getting complicated, but on your example of Guido Reni's work (1575-1642) "The Abduction of Helen"....the blue on the neck is part of an old system of color bands that they used in those days. Here is how it works:

When rendering skin tones of the face, only the color of Yellow Ochre appeared above the eyebrows.

From the eyebrows to the chin, only the color Vermillion appeared.

From the chin line on down over the neck and chest, Blue was the color used.

If any of these colors get mixed up, (i.e., Red on the forehead looks "lobsterish", Blue in the face looks like illness, Yellow on the neck looks "cadaverish"....or whatever) the result is a visual disaster.

If you go to a museum, look at the Italian renaissance masters and you can detect the use of these color bands.

Some painters, like Reni, may have pushed the envelope...

As far as primary colors go, my palette consists of a warm and a cool red, a warm and a cool yellow and a warm and a cool blue (glazes only on blues) plus black and white.

I personally think that if any one of the primary colors (Red, Yellow, Blue) plus Black and White are missing from a painting, the eye will "hunger" and the painting will look as if something is missing.

For example, if you look at each and every one of Vermeer's paintings, you will see the following represented:
Red
Yellow
Blue
Black
White

As far as the Mona Lisa goes, I suspect that you are looking at a poor reproduction...when I saw her two years ago, she was like a little jewel. I was surprised at how much better she looked than I expected her to - she wasn't yellow.

[Douglas Drenkow]

Brilliant analyses, Karin -- utterly illuminating!

Yes, the "bands" of color -- I see it in Helen, I saw something like it in Diana, and I remember seeing it in various Italian Renaissance paintings at the Norton Simon Museum as well.

My palette is very similar to yours (although I dropped a cool yellow, since the only greens I've painted are for foliage, which in nature is almost always of a low to moderate chroma -- any red in my warm yellow only serves to subdue the green)...

http://www.douglasdrenkow.com/page17.html

In addition, with earth shades, I feel like Jim does for all specialized colors -- the wider variety at hand the happier I am.

And I envy your visiting La Gioconda in person -- I've only seen reproductions, invariably yellowed.

Thank you for sharing so much with me (and for putting up with my being so very opinionated, by nature)! It was an honor exchanging views with someone as accomplished as you and Jim.

I must retreat to the easel -- a gallery beckons!

[Karin Wells]

I have one more point to clarify here...

The terms warm and cool are relative to the surrounding color, i.e., a daub of "yellow x" might appear cool and the very same color placed in another spot may be seen as "warm."

In my palette, "Winsor-Newton's yellow ochre pale" is my warm yellow. And "Winsor-Newton's yellow ochre" is my cool color.

I don't buy green paint, I mix it to get natural greens...these are the two that I use most often: Cad. Orange mixed with Prussian Blue, and Yellow Ochre Pale mixed with Ivory Black."

[Douglas Drenkow]

Thanks again, Karin!

Excellent point about "warm" and "cool".

A Winsor-Newton lemon yellow had been my "cool" yellow.

I, too, like to mix my own greens. I've used viridian only once (but am looking forward to using that beautiful color again somewhere); and for foliage I've either started with a Hooker's green or mixed my own, like you, from a yellow ochre and ivory black.

Come to think of it, that's not too far from what I found works best for the indigo denim of "blue jeans": Ultramarine plus raw umber (and, of course, white and black as need be).

I've enjoyed our "colorful" talks. Be well!