Representation

An imprimatura is an easy way to unify the color composition of a painting and emphasizes light and shadow, but I prefer to paint alla prima on a white ground in oils. This is more challenging, I think, and forces you to think coloristically.

I was at a figure session the other day, a new one for me, and it was a three hour pose so I brought my oils. There are three basic rules to oil painting: alway paint from the back to the front; always put down the shadows before the lights; feel free to ignore the first two rules (the rules of watercolor are the exact opposite: you paint from the front to the back and you put down the lights followed by the darks).

So I had finished my initial drawing on the canvas (I use Cerulean Blue; it's a cool, weak pigment that tends to blend in with later painting and I find it's easier to warm up a cool painting than cool down a warm one) and begun the delayed gratification part of a painting: the background. The model was leaning on a column in front of a bare gray green wall. I mixed up a color which was redder than the actual color. This was carelessness on my part rather a deliberate choice. I was eager to get to work on the figure and so didn't spend the additional time to fix the color.

But this got me thinking. When I paint a portrait or a nude, the first thing I do is paint the environment the subject is in. I don't just paint a nude; I paint a nude inhabiting a certain volume of space, in a certain place, at a certain time. The same goes for landscapes., especially for landscapes. A landscape is first and foremost an enormous volume of Newtonian space, populated as it may be by trees, mountains, water, and air. It is perhaps a hundred cubic miles of space, directly apprehended and converted to pigment and oil.

The atmosphere is a concrete element in landscape painting but it exists as well in the portrait, the nude and the still life. None of them can exist except in the context of a three dimensional environment.

Representation is the depiction of colored volumes in space.