Speaking of Art Blog

During this pandemic I’ve been sorting through old stuff, lots of it, including old notes and handouts from art workshops I’ve taken over the course of the past 20 years.  One of those workshops was a 5-day pastel seminar I took with Sally Strand in 2007 called The Color of Light.  I enjoyed looking back at my notes from that week where I learned so many valuable art tips.  One in particular didn’t seem to make a very big impression on me at that time, but its value has deepened over the intervening years.  It’s something Sally calls Name that Color.  Sally had each of us name a color to ourselves before we chose a pastel to match the color we were seeing, and use it to create a likeness of our view on paper.  She didn’t mean for us to name the exactly correct color word that you would find in an art course lexicon somewhere.  No, what she wanted was for us to verbalize the distinction between the color we were looking for and the color that we were used to calling it since we were two years old.  An example will help at this point.

Hidden, pastel, 14x11"

Here is my latest pastel painting that I rendered as a Zoom demo for some of my art students last month.  This is a lesson in greens, all kinds of shades of green.  And here is some of the Name that Color analysis I was doing inside my head as I worked on this piece:

Question: What shade of green do I need to add in that space?  Is it darker or lighter than what is next to it? Answer: Darker.

Question: How much darker?  Answer: A little bit darker, but not as dark as the shadow behind the frog’s head.

Question: Is it leaning more toward blue-green or yellow-green?   Answer: blue-green, but still more green than blue.  Not in the blue family, but definitely cooler than the color next to it. 

Question: Is it more muted than the color next to it or is it bolder and more saturated?  Answer: More muted, quieter, grayer.

Question:  How much grayer?  Answer:  Gray enough that I need to look in my Thunderstorm Greys collection to find the right pastel.

Whew!  That’s a lot of dialogue going on inside my head for identifying one color.  But actually I do that kind of analysis so often that it takes me mere seconds anymore.  It used to take me a LOT longer.  Now it’s like a reflex to me.

So why does it help?  Well, it helps because it brings my color analysis up to my level of consciousness, to where I’m taking the time to notice EXACTLY what color I need.  Finding the right color is not guess work when I use this method.  My color choices become more intentional.

But what about going beyond what I see and letting my creative flair run with color choices that I don’t see in front of me?  I can still do that, but I would contend that even veering away from the colors that are in front of me begins with knowing what’s there.  How can I possibly know how far I want to veer off the road if I don’t even know where the road is?  Naming the color is where I start.  From there I can leap to wherever I want to go.  For instance, continuing the analysis I started above, I might want to ask myself: 

Question: If I want to push the color even more toward blue than what I see, what color will do that for me?  How much bluer can I make it and still have it read as blue-green?  Answer: I’ll try a blue-green that is a little bolder and bluer and less gray and see if that works.

But I first have to identify how blue the color is that I see in front of me, before I can push it even more in that direction.  Naming the color is my starting point each time, it’s my home base.  I spend so much less time throwing color up on my paper, hoping that something works out.  With each subsequent painting I’m honing my color finding skills such that differentiating between subtle shades of color becomes second nature.  My paintings have become color richer for it.

Name that Color.  Such a valuable lesson that I keep practicing every time I go to my easel.  Anymore, I wouldn’t dream of wandering down the art road without it.