Color in Landscape.

I have been recently having some real problems with color, mostly stemming from an over-reliance on the empirical world. In other words my palette has been too balanced, too even. Jared made a studio visit the other night and helped me identify the crisis that I have been having in the studio and helped me with a course of action: get out and paint outdoors with a pre-determined palette. Gulp.

Great advice, but a bit scary, so I did the natural thing and retreated to a stack of books: color theory, art books of my favorite painters, art survey books, museum catalogs. I have been studying the color relations in the art that is closest to the direction I am shooting for these days. It was a Pierre Bonnard painting that set the light bulb off. Red. Orange. Ah-hah! I have an aversion to using too much hot color, even though I really like some paintings that are very hot (particularly some orange Diebenkorns and Parks).

So, I have to do a red and orange painting. The thought makes my knees weak. I paint Cerulian blue and Terre Verte and high light on Naples yellow sand. I use a lot of white: there is something mesmerizing about the border between chalk and frosting. The red that creeps into my paintings is general Indian Red, or maybe touches of Alizarin Crimson, but not explosive Cadmium red!

So, I was driving from Sacramento to the Bay Area this morning, paying careful attention to the hills. Although it is foggy and grey here in El Cerrito, it was a particularly brilliant morning in the Central Valley. The hills are golden with Spanish grass, punctuated by oaks. The colors are a fairly tight-knit palette, basically the combinations that are proving to be boring on my paintings.

Then it hit me! The colors are not boring in nature because the cover so much of the retina. You see, in real life we can be completely enveloped by a hillside or a field. But to get that much yellow stimulus on our retina from a small canvas, we have to hop up the color a bit. Cad yellow! Pow! Then, thinking about the Symbolists made me think of ways to inject the color into the painting in a different way.

I cannot promise that this will be the best paintings I have done, nor even that they will not be the worst, but I have some exciting ideas to work with. If I can figure out how, I will post images in a couple of months.

Even though I love color, I remain convinced that composition and drawing trump all. For all of their chromatic majesty, Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series can actually work in black and white reproduction as compositions. So, given this bent of mine, I am a little nervous about taking such an unabashedly coloristic approach to my work.

Meanwhile, I would love to hear from all of you about color experiences in art: stuff you have seen that really made an impact.

Later we may have to discuss the role color played in the aesthetics of the Middle Ages, because I have been astonished by the way it is dealt with in Eco's Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. Fascinating stuff!