A Very Restricted Palette
Using a palette of white and grays has allowed Daniel Maidman to explore new properties in his artwork
Using a palette of white and grays has allowed Daniel Maidman to explore new properties in his artwork
Ever since I started painting, my primary goal has been to depict the figure as a living, breathing human being. I built up my anatomy and rendering, so I could make the figure coherent, cohesive and convincing. I wanted the solid, dynamic figure to serve in the painting as the body does in real life: as the vessel of a unique person. I struggled, refined, corrected and progressed for years, and then, suddenly, I did it. And I had absolutely no idea what to do next. I have found a rule in my work as an artist: Once I master something, I am not allowed to do it anymore. All the life goes out of it. So it was with the pure, isolated figure in painting.
I puttered around for another couple years, seeking a path forward. I still painted isolated figures, but I was trying new elements and techniques, seeking some way forward. At the start of 2019, I painted A World Without Shadows, a painting of fashion model Amy Hixson. I tried out the most limited palette I could find: only white and warm gray. This really leapt out at me: the image was not quite of a living person—it was poised between life and sculpture. There was a massive, stony presence to it, a powerful feeling of light and shadow, of in front and behind— even though the entire image existed inside a very narrow range of contrast and color. After several days of meditation, I suddenly felt an entirely new landscape opening before me. Part of my fixation on the figure has always been sheer attraction to the human machine. But another part of it has been impatience: impatience with everything else. Multiple figures? Backgrounds? Narrative? Who can really be bothered? Perhaps I was getting older, or perhaps the media were telling me what I was looking for. But suddenly, I could conceive of painting everything, absolutely everything, so long as I could use this magical combination of white and gray. So I went to a slowly growing folder in my computer, labeled AMBIGUITIES, and pulled out a photograph my friend Ed Felker took years ago that I had always meant to paint, if I could only figure out how. In a fit of excitement, I painted it in a couple of days. Now I was really beginning to understand what I had stumbled on. The painting of Amy was done from life, but this second painting— The Edge of the Forest— was done from a photograph. The relation of the painting to photography showed me two invaluable properties of my extremely restricted palette: 1. The human eye can distinguish details across an enormous range of luminosities. This means that we can pick out details in the brightest brights and the darkest darks of most scenes. Our native vision is not too different from a Reubens painting, where
nothing is ever too bright or too dark to see. A camera, by contrast, has a much smaller dynamic range. Below a certain darkness, it yields only its darkest value, and above a certain brightness, only its brightest bright. Painters like Caravaggio and Vermeer reproduce the flattening of lights and darks that cameras yield. This gives them the startlingly “real” quality the modern eye finds in them: our media landscape has trained us to assign supreme validity to the output of the machine lens. This white and gray palette I had discovered has the same quality: Because it allows such a narrow range of available values, darks and lights tend to cluster together to pure white and pure gray. I’ve never painted “like a camera” before, and I found the possibilities fascinating. 2. In contrast with a normal photograph, my darkest darks were very bright. Because the viewer knows that there is a lot more darkness available than I
am using in this work, the idiom foregrounds how much information is missing from the images I’m painting. Everything below “X” brightness is simply amputated, leaving the gloomy brightness of a world without shadows. This silvery quality evokes the major conditions in which human beings suffer loss of information: memory and dreams. To me, there is a great excitement in the mechanical realism of this idiom, and great power in its quality of dreaming and forgetting. I am finding I have tremendous patience to explore the world it opens up— and I haven’t mastered it yet, so I’m able to keep going, for now.