KindTree - Autism Rocks

Rainbow Sky

Thoughts on color

By Mary-Minn Sirag
http://www.kindtree.org/marketplace/artists/mary-minn-sirag 

      Why do paint sets have so many browns and grays and so few colors that when mixed add up to a third brilliant color? It’s all too frustratingly easy to brown up a color. I crave the brilliant, saturated colors that don’t dim out into flat pastels when they dry, and that mix into a third pure and brilliant saturated color that glows from without and within.

In 4-color printing, the primary colors are magenta, cyan, yellow ("yelo") and black. All colors are mixtures—for instance, pure red is 50% yellow and 50% magenta. Paler, less saturated colors are percentage screens–for instance, a pink would be a smaller but equal percentage of magenta and yellow—say 20/20.

From magenta and cyan you can get regal purples, which is not only the most difficult color—at least for me—to create from scratch, but also the rarest color in any paint set. Not fair at all!

With pigment, it’s a little different. For me, magenta remains pivotal. Most reds contain too much yellow to mix into a pure purple without browning up sadly. In pigment, cyan translates roughly into turquoise-teal pigment, which contains too much yellow. Cobalt blue is the purest, with no red in it to brown up a luminous green, or yellows to brown up the purples. Lemon glows by itself and plays best with other colors, as well. Most of the time, though, I’m lazy and end up forking out for a tube or half-pan of the pigment color I want—especially when it comes to those brilliant greens and purples.

Looking Up At Mt. Fuji After the Great Tsunami

I’m doing watercolors lately. They’re portable, convenient, easy to clean up; immediate, with fast results. I don’t need more than half a 4’ x 6’ table to lay out my Yarka Original, Expanded and Sequel sets and my Windsor Newton Rose Madder and Cerulean Blue. I don’t mess around with student-grade watercolors or paper. If I do, the colors aren’t brilliant and they puddle, even more than they already do under the not so firm tutelage of my brush. (I haven’t quite figured out good brushes yet.)

I dirty up water licketty split, so I keep two small paint buckets full of clean water at my side so as not to be refilling my water every five minutes. I do the first brush cleaning in one bucket and then the more refined cleaning in the second one. That way, I’m changing only the first frequently. The second one stays clear longer than if I were to use the first until it muddies up and then move on to the second. 

When I complained to a gentleman working at Oregon Art Supply a while ago about how cakey some of my once brilliant and easily mixed Sennelier and Windsor watercolors have become, he clued me in that they have been bought out by another company. So it’s not just me being a pea princess. I felt vindicated.

He pointed me to some lovely David R. Daniel paints but I was cash-strapped that day. They’re out of Seattle, so it’s likely that they will capture the light of the Pacific Northwest. He tells me that they are still crafted by actual artists, unlike the Windsor Newton and Sennelier paints.

My mother has been painting for 70 years. When she lived in France in the ‘40s, there were different paint companies, each of which captured the light of the country where they were made. Maybe that’s why I’ve liked Windsor Newton so much: the light in Eugene is more like England than France or Italy. All this is another excuse to treat myself to some David Daniels.

Winter has traditionally been the season for me of intricate pen-and-ink, reminiscent of the lacy and skeletal lines and more austere silver-grays of winter. I have drawn lichen-nesses, crumpled leaves, still lives of cyclamen in crystal vases, with attention to the icy facets of the crystal.

In 2002, I started teaching painting, so I needed to bone up—fast--on painting, since I had barely dabbled in painting before then. Fortunately, having studied drawing in college, I already had a strong foundation in composition and drawing. 

The last time I had seriously painted was in high school. My high-school watercolors were a serious attempt at “pigment realism”, where you attempt to match pigment to the color that would come out of an exactly colored photograph. My paintings from back then have a downcast look, with their ochres, olive drabs and tepid blues.

When I was in high school, my mother took me and my siblings to a Matisse cut-out show. I remember a purple tomato that looked redder and juicier, more realistic to me, than anything red I’d ever laid eyes upon. As Matisse, or Picasso (or whoever it was) said apocryphally, “When you cannot use the blue, use the red.” How we perceive color is more than simply an accurate use of pigment, percentage-wise.

All About Green

Green is the most difficult color to capture. Breathing life into our planet and beings, it sparkles the air and glows from the inside. Pigment matching does it no justice. For that very reason, I avoided green for years. A few years ago, while painting in my back yard, I decided to make my peace with it. Perception is contextual and emotional, not just is a subjective impression of a color. I discovered that green contains as many oranges, reds and, especially, purples as pigment greens. This composite green captured this magnificent color perfectly to me, as did the dimensions of the painting, 27” x 40”.

     I used to be intimidated by the perfectionism of watercolor, the seeming necessity to get it right the first time by using perfect technique. For me, technique is a workaround for when I can’t capture what I want, rather than a way to capture it correctly in the first place. All is not lost with those muddly, puddly dead blotches and those watered down tepidities. I have found ways to finesse with various hues of whites. At the risk of appearing cheesy, I sometimes apply iridescent and metallic powders to add luster.

Mary-Minn Sirag at www.kindtree.org