Backgrounds Matter

10/25/2023 1:15:18 PM

When we moved into our house in Florida in July, I was thrilled to discover many glorious things growing in the backyard. There are banana, lemon, lime, orange, and fig trees! Grapes are vining up the trellis! In addition to the standard plants in a vegetable garden, there is ginger, edamame, and artichoke! I love plants. I love fresh produce. I couldn’t be more enthused. BUT Florida has its own special insects and nematodes and mildews. Florida has different growing seasons. There’s been a lot to learn, and in the time that it has taken to settle and start researching plant life down here, my bananas are being decimated by some unidentified insect, my citrus trees show signs of disease, and two palm trees have utterly dried up and died! When we looked at the house back in June, there were lovely roses growing in the front, but they were gone by the time we moved in July. I had assumed the rose bush was dying, too. But a couple weeks ago, several more roses appeared. Here’s a painting of one of them. This is the first time I’ve tried a quasi- high key painting (i.e., a painting in the light range of the value spectrum). High key paintings inevitably lack strong contrasts, but they can end up with a soft gentleness that I like.   

All of this is a prelude to what I really want to talk about, which is backgrounds. The background of a painting is something that almost entirely escaped my attention until I began painting myself. When I lived in Denver and was learning to draw in Ali Ghassan’s atelier, I overheard him say to one of his students that backgrounds can make or break a painting. Nothing could be more true, I’m finding. My favorite painting I ever made was ruined by a bad background, and I have been dissatisfied with many more. The lesson of this rose painting is that simple is often better. Here I just went in with the wash, let it fade to white in places, and called it done. 

Here’s a summary of things I’m learning about backgrounds, which I’ll be striving to put into practice in the coming months (or years?):

1. A good background needs some variety. A flat wash is boring. The variety of the background should not, however, call attention to itself but should serve to highlight the areas of interest in the painting. 

2. A background will distract the viewer if it has a lot of value contrasts and hard edges. It’s better to make soft transitions. Wet-in-wet painting is a great technique for backgrounds. This also means, however, that you need to be decisive about how you will paint your background before you start, or it will dry on you and leave streaks and hard edges. 

3. Since bright colors demand our attention, often a background will distract if it is as high in chroma as the areas of interest in the painting. Duller colors tend to work better. There are exceptions, though. See Van Gogh.

4. The background should provide value contrast at the focal point of the painting. If you want to paint the light hitting a white rose, a dark background by the flower’s edge will make the light stand out. Similarly, a dark orchid will be lost if the background is also dark, but a light background will draw the viewer’s eye to the flower.  

5. One way to provide a subtle variety to the background is to shift the color temperature as you paint. If your background is gray, for example, you can mix up a puddle tending towards blue-gray on one side of the palette and a warm, subtly orange gray on the other. That said, cool colors tend to recede and warmer colors tend to come forward, so be careful with warmth in the background. I have seen many successful paintings with a warm background, but in my experience thus far, a dominantly warm background is more risky, perhaps unless your focal area is cool. I’ll have to experiment with this more and see what I discover.

6. Sometimes it’s best to make a background color using the pigments already on your palette. Mix them up (but not wholly, so you still have a variety of color) and, if you’re going for a light background, add lots of water. Mixing the paints you are already using will dull your background colors (see 3.) and will also retain color harmony with the rest of the painting.     

Cheers!

Simplify

10/7/2023 2:13:09 PM

  Recently I wrote about Andy Evansen’s method of painting: paint in three distinct value layers–light, medium, and dark–and let the paint blend freely in both the light and medium washes. In order to pull these first two washes off, you have to be able to mix colors very quickly, so that you can paint an entire wash before the paint dries and forms hard edges. In an effort to gain speed in color mixing, I have been experimenting with limited palettes. By confining my palette to only three or four pigments, I eliminate options that inevitably slow down my decision-making. With a limited palette, if I need to go darker, make the mix warmer, etc., I usually only have one route to that end. Isn’t that what they say about life as well? Unclutter your mind of unnecessary options that bog you down. This is just as freeing in painting as in anything.

Working with limited palettes, however, do much more than save time. I have been reading Hazel Soan’s latest book called Art of the Limited Palette, and she maintains that her most colorful paintings are those that use no more than three pigments. The reason for this is because mixing pigments tends to dull the chroma or brightness of the paint. While muted (or low chroma) colors play an important role in a painting, if too many pigments are in the mix, the result can be dead, muddy, opaque, like the color of the water you rinse your brushes in after painting for a while. Painting with fewer pigments ensures that as you mix colors and layer your washes, even the resulting grays and browns will be luminescent and lively. Furthermore, using a limited palette guarantees that the colors of the painting will be harmonious. No color can stick out like a sore thumb if it has been used throughout the piece. Finally, practicing with limited palettes helps you to attain a deeper knowledge of the character of a specific pigment, so that you have a clear grasp of what it can and cannot do. 

So, in addition to Andy Evansen’s value studies, working with limited palettes is my new practice. These orchids from the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens were painted almost entirely with Ultramarine Blue, Permanent Alizarin Crimson, and Winsor Lemon. I was unable to get a dark enough mix for the soil from these three pigments, however, and had to swap out Winsor Lemon for New Gamboge to get a true black. This was not painted with the looseness and spontaneity that I so admire in Andy Evansen’s work, but I learned some things about color, which is a step in that direction.