Blue and Red Still Life - Relative Tone Exercise
30th October 2006
Oil on Panel 12" X 14"
30th October 2006
Oil on Panel 12" X 14"
Picasso's got nothing on me. He only ever had one blue and one red period. I've had three of each already, and all in the same month too. I concede that each one only consisted of a single painting, but that's a mere technicality. This the third and, for the time being at least, the last of the blue/red tonal exercises.
This time I wanted to make the exercise slightly more complicated again than the last two. The first one, done from a cast of Adonis, was the simplest because the cast is monochrome. It's far easier to translate a monochrome subject into a tonal exercise. The second one was a slight step up in difficulty in two ways, firstly because I had a high chroma colour - the orange of the clementine - to translate to tone, and secondly because I did both the blue and red one in the same day - blue in the morning, red in the afternoon. They were, however, much smaller than the Adonis paintings. The Adonis paintings got a day each all to themselves.
For this one, I set up a more complicated still life subject with a blue, a red and a yellow object, plus the black and white coffee pot to give me a tonal anchor at each end of the scale. The general idea was that having to translate a colour of each of the three commonly called primary colours, each of a different chroma (or intensity) would stretch my ability to see tone separately from colour and mean translating the two blue and red objects into their opposites, respectively. I know that blue and red aren't technically complimentaries in the usual sense, it would be blue/orange and red green, but bear with me, I'm working with you, on this thing. I'm cooperating here. I mean opposites in terms of each painting.
The set up seemed simple enough; a few objects on a shelf, with a fairly strong light source (the window, I don't use electric light for painting) on the left. As usual, it was all set up in a grey cloth lined shadow box to minimise reflected light and simplify the tones. Since we're into winter proper now, I'm down to about seven hours a day of paintable light, so allowing for cleaning brushes between paintings, I really only had three hours max on each of these. I had to work fast.
I'm not going to pretend for a moment that this was an easy exercise, it wasn't. The time factor meant I barely had a chance to stand back and look at what I was doing, but I think it's good to be put under pressure sometimes. The masochist in me quite enjoyed that part of it.
This being my third go at this exercise, I'm less surprised now by the fact that it's possible to create as convincing a feeling of light with the compressed tonal range of the red version as it is with the blue. As has been the case with the previous ones, I prefer the red version. But for this one, I did change a few things in the red one. It being the second one, it's difficult not to change a few things that strike you as out on the first version. For example, the shelf cutting the picture right across horizontally as it does in the blue one struck me as uncomfortable. Strangely, it doesn't bother me now.
Regardless, I'm much less concerned these days with painting a literal representation of my subject, so in the red painting I let the shelf pretty much fade out at the edges of the painting. Softening it helped the composition a bit, I think. I also prefer the way the front edge of the shelf works. Letting it get soft and vague at the edges meant that the harder edge in the middle, below the bowl, naturally draws your eye to that part of the painting, at least I think it does. I emphasised that by bringing up the light on that part of the shelf too. I first started messing about with that kind of thing in the series of small still life drawings, and it can really shift the focus of the picture. It's another example of how I'm moving away from slavish copying of my subjects, and allowing the picture to dictate it's own logic in how the edges are handled as much as it does in the tones. The goal is always to make a more convincing feeling of reality, but also to make a better picture too.
I was almost grateful when the light started to fade and I had to stop. I have to admit, working fast and keeping my concentration up for the whole day, pretty much without a break, was quite tiring. In terms of the paintings, I think the balance of tones is better in the red one, particularly on the tomato. I think the high chroma sent me a bit haywire on the blue one and I got it a bit too light in relation to the other tones in the picture.
Like the clementine painting, I proceeded to a full colour version of this subject the next day, with what I can only describe as appalling results. That painting was a real struggle. It all hinged around the high chroma of the tomato, it gave me a lot of trouble, and the more I fiddled with the painting to try and sort it out, the worse it got.
Eventually I had to admit defeat. But after a few days of licking my wounds, I came back to give it another go, spending two days on it this time. The second bash was a slight improvement, but at the end of the day this subject was best left as an exercise. The tomato was included to force me to deal with high chroma as tone only, and in that sense it worked admirably. But it just didn't sit right in the composition when the colour came in, and I had to knock it right back in the second version of this painting to have it work at all.