palette paintings

 
It's easier to understand a painter's palette if you see it both as an abstract pattern on the color wheel, and "in action" as a finished painting. This section presents a gallery of very different palettes and a painting by the artist who uses them.

Palettes aren't merely a mechanism to mix colors: they must harmonize with a style of painting. "Photorealist" painters typically use rather small brushes and do not include granulating paints on their palettes, because pigment granulation conflicts with the aim of exactly controlling the color textures. Other artists prefer granulating paints and large, juicy brushstrokes because these produce unpredictable, expressive texture effects. Still others build their paintings through the patient layering of glazes, and therefore want a palette of transparent colors. A painter's palette embodies the logic of his technique.

Besides stylistic or technical considerations, all artists must cope with the four fundamental palette limitations in value range, chroma range, pigment attributes, and mixing inconvenience. These limitations become more acute on smaller palettes, especially those that adhere to the "primary" triad palette and its offspring, the split "primary" palette. How a painter responds to these limitations is also a reflection of her technique.

Interestingly, the artists who most emphasize the accurate representation of value and light, such as Jean Grastorf or Nita Engle, often have the most restricted palettes of all — a dozen or fewer paints. Color variety can detract from the control an artist wants to achieve.

Artists who become exuberant colorists, or who tackle subjects (such as botanical or floral motifs) that invite intense and contrasted colors, often expand their palettes. It's the rare floral artist who (like Marlies Najaka) only uses a baker's dozen of paints. Jim Kosvanec uses two dozen or so paints, and Joseph Raffael may use 40 or more different paints in a single massive watercolor. In part, this is because hues spaced closer together on the hue circle create more saturated color mixtures, so more paints means maximum color intensity. But frequently the main attraction is the contrasting character of the pigments themselves, which the painters use as pure color, without much mixing.

Often a large number of paints signals the artist's desire to accent pigment variety. Blue paints in particular — fleecy ultramarine blue, moody iron or indanthrone blue, shimmering cobalt blue, liquid phthalocyanine blue, and roughly granulating cerulean blue — are oversampled for their textural contrasts. Artists with a meticulous painting technique are sensitive to the handling attributes of different paints — staining vs. nonstaining, transparent vs. opaque, saturated vs. muted — and this usually leads to a larger selection of paints.

Despite the fussy — and pointless — prohibition against using black paints in "transparent" watercolors, many of the artists included here, like Chuck Long or Michael Rocco, choose one or more "black" paints (usually convenience mixtures such as sepia, neutral tint, payne's gray or indigo that consist primarily of a carbon black pigment tinted with a staining pigment) to extend the palette's value range into the deepest darks. And most artists — even those such as Lucy Willis who adhere to a split "primary" palette — choose a convenience green — permanent green, hooker's green, sap green or olive green — to provide a dark, muted green without mixing. Despite the watercolorist's conventional wisdom, no paint company makes its green paints by mixing yellow and blue, so there is no reason artists should reject a green paint on their palette.

Four issues seem to influence the design of a palette, separate from the demands of an artist's style:

• emphasis on "primary" colors: some artists rely on a mixing framework built explicitly on the so called "primary" colors. This is always the concept behind any palette that lacks violet, orange and/or green paints. The minimal form is the three paint primary triad palette, which in the right hands is capable of beautifully subdued and harmonious paintings. Most artists instead build their palettes on the split "primary" foundation, which consists of three pairs of red, yellow, and blue pigments — a "warm" and "cool" color in each pair. "Primary" color palettes have the interesting attribute of emphasizing the control of color temperature within a hue span, while producing relatively dull (though often lifelike) color mixtures in the oranges, violets and greens. Nita Engle and Michael Rocco, whose very different painting styles disguise their common interest in the effects of light and atmosphere, both use a modified split primary palette. However there are many minimal or restricted palettes (such as the Trevor Chamberlain or Velázquez palettes) that work very well without any particular focus on "primary" colors.

• balance of warm/cool colors: the warm/cool contrast is the spine of our color perception, a kind of "metacomplementary" contrast anchored in natural light. Although warm colors typically predominate over cool in modern palettes, artists differ greatly in how much they emphasize this difference: some artists choose many more warm than cool colors, while others choose their paints to produce chromatic balance on the two sides of the hue circle.

• maximum color intensity: palettes became brighter (more saturated) in the middle 19th century, during the Victorian era, a change that appears clearly if you compare the 18th century classical palette or the economical Velázquez palette with many of the modern palettes shown here. But not all: both Trevor Chamberlain omits a highly saturated yellow paint, and other artists omit a saturated orange, red, violet or green paint. A preference for subdued rather than intense color mixtures also appears in the choice of "earth" (iron oxide) pigments, which formed the core of the classical palette: some artists, such as Liz Donovan, include several iron oxide paints (siennas, ochres, umbers, reds or earths), while others (Chuck Long or Lucy Willis) omit them almost entirely.

• number of paints: some artists, such as Chuck Long or Jeanne Dobie, manage with a relatively small but well balanced choice of paints, and the minimalist artist's primaries, split primary or secondary palettes carry this preference to an extreme. In contrast, colorist artists prefer an ample palette, and the tertiary color wheel often forms the basic footprint. In some cases the paint choices seem intended to permit mixing directly on the paper — the ample selection of greens included in the palette by Mel Stabin, for example. In other cases, such as Carol Carter's large palette, the selection seems designed simply to provide the most intense colors possible, used unmixed on the page.

Want to analyze a palette for yourself? It's easy to do:

(1) Make a printout or copy of the key to the palette scheme.

(2) Lay a blank piece of paper on top, and trace the outline of the color circle and the twelve color spokes within it.

(3) Go through the artist's palette, one paint at a time, and identify the pigment in each paint. Use the complete palette to find the color category where that paint belongs. (For convenience mixtures, guess the most appropriate color category based on the pigments it contains.)

(4) Use the key to the palette scheme to locate that color in the color wheel. Mark the spot with a diamond, and write in the name of the color. Do this for every paint.

Surprisingly, the artists profiled here are sometimes slow to change their palettes when this means giving up a favorite but fugitive pigment. Many art books still recommend the use of aureolin, alizarin crimson and rose madder genuine, even though these are unsuitable for museum or gallery quality artworks.

However, as these choices are an intimate part of an artist's approach, I've let their recommendations stand rather than insert my substitutes (benzimidazolone yellow PY154, perylene maroon PR179, quinacridone rose PV19) for the same pigments.

In a few cases I've silently edited the artist's selection of a discontinued paint with the manufacturer's own replacement color or the closest equivalent I know of: quinacridone maroon for brown madder alizarin, benzimidazolone orange for chrome orange, and so on.
 

Last revised 08.01.2005 • © 2005 Bruce MacEvoy