This past month, I spent a significant amount of time painting in Maine, as far Northeast as I could manage by car. Here, there are few tourists and much quietude. The elemental space of sea and cliffs brings me back to myself. I am consoled by its sheer force and power to evoke metaphysical thoughts, recentering me.
The rock formations in this area are dominated by grays, whereas further South, Acadia is formed by warm-toned rock; Lubec’s rocks are cool and neutral. It has taken me several years to achieve the quality of the coloring of these rock heads stretching out into the Bay of Fundy. I found that the Bi colors and Hues, in several combinations, facilitated the accuracy of what I witnessed.
My landscape palette is the Full Spectrum Palette [see The Color Investigations of Robert Henri, Vol. 1, Chapters 5, 7, and 8], balanced and harmonized by the complete integration of the primaries within the secondary and tertiary mixes [top line of root notes]. This includes the second line of Bi colors and the third line of Hues. When painting en plein air, I do not premix lines 2 and 3, except for the Y Hue [line 3]. The reason for this is: 1) I’m inherently familiar with the Full Spectrum Palette and reflexively can mix the combinations; 2) I like to mix between some of the intervals on the Bi color line to get subtle variety; 3) I also like to not fully mix these colors, but allow the 2 notes that make up the mixture to loosely flow together- sometimes emphasizing one color over another- visually joining within the viewer’s mind. I find this adds a hidden vitality to the painting. All this is possible because the palette is already harmonized before I commence painting.
The rocky heads along the Bay of Fundy are primarily gray with mixes of violet-red or a dull yellow in some places. The difficulty lies in conveying the rock’s warm illumination while retaining its inherent grayness. As the quality of the illumination changes, capturing the gray underlying the dominant color of the light becomes challenging.
I found the most effective way to deal with this was to first mix my gray combinations, both warms and cools, then add my dominant light mix in increments to these base grays. [Henri referred to the dominant light as the lightener; see The Color Investigations of Robert Henri, Vol. 1, p.79] The color of the lightener varied with the quality of the day and the time- morning, afternoon, or evening. In the painting Morning Reflections, the rising sun, dominated by RO, was slowly giving way to a GB quality as it rose higher. The image retains the warmth in the sky but accentuates the greener/cooler reflected light in the shadows. In Dispersing Fog, the warmth of the morning sun is held by the fog, giving the scene a pearlescent quality with the cool shadows and gray-violet sea.
Here are some of the semi-neutralized mixtures I found most effective for adding variety to the grays. [see The Color Investigations of Robert Henri, Vol. 1, p. 49]
The cools:
- G + BV [GBB Bi]
- G + V [B hue]
- G + VR [near-complement]
- GB + BV [B Bi]
- GB + V [BBV Bi]
- GB + VR [BVV Bi]
- OY + BV [Neutral]
- O + BV [near-complement]
The warms:
- RO + GB [neutral]
- RO + G [near- complement]
- O + G [Y hue]
- O + V [R hue]
You may say that these combinations are not gray enough! But it is key that the image feels illuminated by the sun, whether it is clear, cloudy, or foggy. Color conveys the sensation of illumination. No color, no quality of light.
Brilliancy is going toward color, not toward white.
Robert Henri, The Art Spirit, p.260
Note the dominance of the secondaries: O, G, V. Also, G, GB, BV, and V were key. Many of the grays were combinations of these 4 notes. Most of these notes were raised in value by white or by the lightener [such as O + VR + white as an example in Dispersing Fog].
Achieving a variety in these grays was challenging and part of the beauty of painting along the Bay of Fundy- dream like and mysterious.