Cool Reds, Warm Blues

Naturalistic painting relies on a number of essential concepts and processes. The concepts inform the way painters develop illusions such as form, space, texture, and so on. The processes govern the preferred approaches to selecting, mixing and layering paint, both in terms of longevity and to support the concepts listed above. Granted, there are, in the art of painting, as in any art, exceptions to any 'rules', but using the concepts and processes, plus a dash of experimentation, can assure satisfying results.

I have attempted to illustrate one such concept, the effective linking of a cool light source with oil paint's inherent opaque lights and transparent shadows. And to refer to the blog title, I have selected red and blue objects that I hope demonstrate this.

The still life consists of several red and blue plastic objects placed in my studio under cool daylight. I first drew from the setup on several sheets of tracing paper over plexiglass to refine the proportions.  This was done quickly, since I wanted to focus on painting.

I transferred the drawing to a panel prepared with rabbit skin glue, using blue Saral transfer paper.

Then, on to the painting. On my palette I laid out Winsor & Newton Foundations white, Mars black, raw umber, transparent yellow oxide, Mars violet deep, alizarin crimson, Winsor red, cobalt and ultramarine blue.

Beginning with the shadows, I applied the paint to the panel in an alla prima approach, using knife at first, then switching between knife and brush.

The aim was to use the natural luminosity of the white panel to make the shadows 'glow' and relying on the transparency of the pigments to replicate the optical 'warmth' i.e., the lack of opacity in the actual shadows. Some of this comes through in the photos, but unfortunately, since I'm not much of a photographer, some of the depth and warmth is not visible.

With the shadows applied, I moved to the halftones, the 'boundary' areas between light and shadow, where I began to add white to the mixtures, thus thickening and cooling them, just as the forms appear in nature.

I placed thick highlights after applying 'local' color to the areas just around the highlights, and finally added the gray background.

So, I attempted to show how a warm object, such as the red ball, can be 'cool', and a cool object, the blue dishwashing man, can be 'warm' at least in the shadows. I hope some of this effect is visible in these photos.

When thinking about this project, I recalled that almost daily I see a similar use of cool lights/warm shadows on my computer: the icon for the Apple's Safari browser. Here is a simple schematic of the color temperature distribution, inspired by that icon, which I hopes further illustrate how a single color can be altered warm and cool by the application of light.