Discovering Color

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the canvas ...

Actually, my painting style has gone through so many changes (as have I) through the years that one can hardly keep track. As far as galleries are concerned this is artistic suicide. Most galleries want artists who have a signature style that they do well and can keep producing in the same vein. But I am a complex organism, not a machine, and so my output changes as I change in the world.

For our new CD, "Dreamtown," my co-writer, Bob Elliott, asked me to look through some old paintings to see if we could find any images to use. He talked about some figures I had done in trippy colors. I looked at what I had been doing recently and realized that I was not painting in trippy colors anymore. I was painting in perfectly sane colors - true to life colors. Colors that were appropriate to the color and intensity of the light from the sky. This had not always been the case.

When I started unrolling some of those old paintings, I was a little startled. They were done in my manic phases where the paintings weren't so much about subject as they were about paint! They were explosions of color - very expressionistic. I was obviously feeling intense feelings while I painted and exploring my emotional attachment to all the various colors. There was hardly a color that I did not use.

Then, I went through my MFA program and really learned to paint all over again. First, I limited my palette. Gone were the intense cadmiums and cobalts and quinacridones. I started looking at Rembrandt, and noticed the almost complete lack of any bright color. He used basically lead white, charcoal black, yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt umber and a few others. He always worked on a dark toned ground. I found this appealing at the time. I took my landscape palette down to chromium green, Van Dyke brown, yellow ochre, venetian red, titanium white and maybe a little cerulean for skies, though most of my skies were gray made from Vandyke brown and white. There was such a balanced consistency to the whole scene. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we do not have a lot of bright blue skies, and gray and dark green are pretty much the extent of our natural palette. I've been living here for about 11 years, and I'm sure the lack of color has influenced my painting. Look at painting from Cuba or Ghana, or Jamaica and you will see a different palette. Look at Van Gogh in Arles and compare to his paintings in Holland. The light we live in affects our painting.

I had learned to harness color to make it do what I wanted. I had learned to limit color by graying it out with its complement. I had learned to portray the light of the Pacific Northwest. But that was not what was in my secret heart. I used to intentionally place bright complements next to each other for their vivid effect. If I saw a little blue in a shadow, I would intensify it to a deep ultramarine. I might see straw-colored grasses on a bright day as stripes of cad yellow and dioxazine purple, strewn with dots of cad red light and cad orange flowers. Everything screamed colors. That is what I noticed when I unrolled those old paintings.

And so I looked at what I was currently working on - some small 8x10 landscapes which were all very proper and unremarkable. I suddenly realized that no one needed to see these places I was painting. Who would care? It was just another tree among billions, another road, another mountain. My painting had become pedestrian. I exerted so much control over the light that they had lost the intense emotion that made me love paint in the first place. So the first thing I did was get rid of the blue sky. We've all seen enough blue skies in our life - I wanted to paint the sky vivid yellow - not just a sunset glow, but a happy yellow that had nothing to do with a color the sky could actually ever be. The light of the sky changes everything. So if this was the light from the sky, how did that affect the trees? The path? The meadow? So, just that suddenly, my painting style changed. I looked at everything as containing the colors of my emotions instead of the color of my eyes.

I went back in to several of the small works I'd been making and completely painted over everything, keeping the good compositions, but cranking the color knob to 11. Shadows were once again deep ultramarine and grasses, cadmium yellow. There were no more gray rocks, but blue or lavender ones. The ground was not longer neutral - it jumped out at you with a pink soil stabbed with ultramarine shadows and flecked with color. I realized that I had been a reporter, when I longed to be F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But now, I had left my manic tendencies behind and was in control of my painting again. Painting is manipulation, in a good way. I can not only force your mind to think of a tree where no tree exists, but I can force you to feel the feelings I want you to feel about that tree. Think of it - You can't look at a good picture of a tree and see it for what it really is - molecules of pigment which reflect certain wavelengths of light, arranged by the artist in a more-or-less two dimensional pattern - you see a tree! And yet there is no tree. You could see it on the moon, in the Sahara Desert or in the Antarctic and you would still think of a tree. The artist forces your mind. He creates thought patterns based on our life's experience of a tree.

And now, in addition to this manipulation of thought patterns, I am playing on all your life's associations with color. The tree can be red and blue and still you accept it as a tree. Yellow and red and blue light can play in the leaves and you may still see them as green. I don't have to report that leaves are green - we all know that. And I have learned my own color-connected emotional language. I know how an alizarin crimson is going to affect you as opposed to a naphthol red. I know when to use chromium green and when to use cadmium green. I know what emotions I connect with colors. It's like knowing when to use a minor chord to convey a slight sadness and when to use a minor 7th for a more serious color of sadness. Or a major 7 for dreaminess. Or a diminished chord for uncertainty. So a cadmium green is happy and optimistic, where an olive green (which is different mixes by different color makers) is subdued and sleepy. A chromium green is a strong adult, no-nonsense color, and a phthalo green is bossy. You can't just use every green in every painting or your head will explode with emotion. This is what I used to do. And that's what my head did.

Now I hope that I've learned enough about light, paint and color to manipulate the viewer in exactly the way I intend. I hope when you see a painted tree now, you will not only think of a tree, but you will understand exactly how I feel about that tree. You will understand why I had to paint that particular tree in a world full of trees. It's never really about a tree, it's about connecting what is inside of the artist to what is inside of the viewer. You can use a tree to do it, or you can use a figure to do it or you can just arrange color on a canvas to do it.

That is why abstract painting is hard for some people to do and hard for some people to look at. Amateurs think they can just splash paint around and call it an abstract painting, and they think this is what abstract painters do. But that is not unlike making a bunch of random utterances and calling it a language. Or making a bunch of unconnected noises and calling it music. Color is a language that has to be studied. The more you study, the more fluent you will be. You can write like a reporter, but you can also write like Marcel Proust. But you cannot write and you cannot read anything unless you know at least some of the language.