Primary Colors

[Douglas Drenkow]

I'm definitely printing out all of this and will follow up. Thanks!

Karin, if you can see anything out of each eye, then you have at least some depth perception (even if one eye is dominant). My roommate in college had a glass eye and could still drive etc. very well. And of course, your paintings present a very convincing illusion of depth (You do love a good illusion, don't you?).

Jim and Cynthia, Mr. Sanden's palette -- with its blues and greens, for neutralizing warm tones -- reminds me of that of Van Dyck (who, however, achieved his translucent fleshtones only by glazing, not with completely pre-mixed paints): Lead white, Naples yellow, yellow ochre, vermillion, red lake, Titian green, ultramarine, raw sienna, charcoal black, and -- of course -- Van Dyck brown.

Which brings us back to the "primary colors" (Imagine that!).

For shadows, I have been using a mixture of ivory black and burnt umber -- in effect, Van Dyck brown (I'm about to try using the Old Holland synthetic version, which unlike the original is permanent).

One of my biggest objections to considering black as truly neutral is that all too many portraits created with a black-and-white underpainting and then glazed very thinly over the shadow areas produce very bluish shadows in the fleshtones: I cringe every time I see a Rubens or a Gainsborough lady with a "five-o'clock shadow" in battleship gray (although I'm sure they're not turning over in their graves in response to my reactions).

Black is surely in the blue family; a true neutral is the deepest, darkest brown one can possibly imagine -- the blue, yellow, and red pigments absorbing every wavelength of the incident spectrum.

By the way, my prejudice towards portraits with black backgrounds may come from my name, "Douglas", which means "out of the black depths".

But you can call me Doug (or Mister Schnook).