Chairman’s Letter
“Never use black on your palette.” How often have we all heard this old art school axiom in beginning art classes or art schools? Of course, this is a rule for young art students trying to master color mixing and to keep them from reaching for the black pigment as the “go-to” color to darken a primary or secondary color. Black paint, being the deepest value on a palette, would seem to make sense to darken any other color, but it is the complementary color directly across from the hue you want to darken that will deepen the value or gray it by cutting down the high intensity of a tube color.
However, once you have built some “good color mixing practices,” I think the rule should be thrown out because black can be a very useful color. It is rare though that artists will see any black in nature as dense and solid as this raw tube color, for when used right from the tube it can be as strong as a cosmic black hole eating and disrupting everything near its edges. My point is that the Los Bravos song, Black is Black, may make sense musically, but for artists it doesn’t hold up when we are surveying the tonal and color subtleties as they exist in our visual world.
As an example, drape a solid black fabric over a chair and notice how you can see the folds and forms of the cloth because black surfaces reflect light like all surfaces. Should you attempt to realistically paint this scene, it could only be done with very closely mixed grays, and then use pure black sparingly only in the deepest folds as accents. Just note that if you are only using black and white mixes with no other colors, you could be able to get the forms right, but the results will seem dead, uninteresting and perhaps flat.
Air holds color in that every surface that is illuminated by a source light which bounces some of its colors out into the surrounding space. This bounced light or glow is called “halation” and in the extreme can be seen around a candle flame or at the edge of a window that is softened by the haze of the light flowing in. Also, the color temperature of the light in any scene has a strong harmonizing effect upon the colors of all the surfaces that it touches. That light can be either warm, as in yellow range of direct sunlight, or cool, as the blue light on a winter overcast day. This surface temperature often by contrast will
cause the shadows to appear the opposite in temperature. Once the young artist can discern these color shifts and mix those colors, they will experience how these subtle shifts in color enrich the forms.
Temperature shifts in color open the door to the mechanics of creating illusionary space that will bring depth and dimension to your drape. The treatment of edges is an area rich in possibilities once the artist begins to understand how light halation softens the edges of objects, and especially for planes that are perpendicular to the artist’s point of view, as they are receiving and bouncing more light than a sharp-turning narrow edge. Think about how this applies to the human head and how soft the edge of a cheek would be, in a ¾-profile, as light would be bouncing off the whole side of the head. This sense of roundness and depth is critical to building a sense of reality in a work.
Edges, of course, get softer as objects recede into space, details will decrease, and darker values will move to the middle of the value scale. This is called aerial perspective or atmospheric perspective and is the effect the atmosphere has on the appearance of an object when seen from a distance. The effect that atmospheric conditions can have upon a distant object can be illustrated by looking through a fish tank filled with fresh, clear water. To represent a clear day, we can see fairly well through the water, but pour a halfcup of milk into the water and you will have the equivalent of a foggy day. The atmosphere is filled with water vapor, dust and other reticulated particles that alter our vision of objects just as the milk in the tank. This hazing effect can also be seen when a shaft of light comes through a dusty room or a barn.
Understanding and embracing these areas are critical to creating paintings that have a feeling of reality and are the steppingstones to bringing your works to a high level. Works that have extreme tonal contrasts, hard edges and low color content are the result of a lack of artistic knowledge and sensitivity which sadly makes me think that for those to which this applies, “Black is Black.”