The Colour of Art
About me, and this site
Painting is the difficult art of putting the right colour in the right place
Hello, my name is David and I am a realist painter determined to play my small part in the re-emergence of realist painting in the art world and the re-discovery of the important role that wonder and joy and beauty can play in all our lives
I have spent many years now trying to gain a more complete understanding of that deceptively simple sentence at the top of the page. I have dedicated myself to discovering just what is the the right colour and where exactly is the right place for I am convinced that the secrets of painting are to be found here. With this website I want to share my discoveries, both past and future, with you whether you are an artist yourself or merely a lover of art, so that I can help you develop your own art practice and appreciation.
A little about my background
When I started trying to paint in the early 1990’s the internet did not exist and I had no way to reach out to others on a similar quest, indeed I had no real way of knowing even if there were others on the same quest. I saw no realist work of quality in galleries or magazines and a year at college left me deeply frustrated at the lack of teaching and the constant demand to “express myself” without anyone even attempting to give me the technical means to do so. I dreamed great works to rival that of Titian or Coreggio or my heroes the Pre-Raphaelites; my teachers told me to glue nails into my sketchbook. I left and started to try and teach myself.
An important discovery
One great benefit only I reaped in that year, although the rewards of it were slow in coming, and that was the discovery of a book called “Colour, Structure and Design” by Richard Ellinger. This little known volume introduced me to the Munsell system of colour notation. Many painters talk of “using Munsell” but fundamentally it is nothing more than a system of classifying colours. Its great strength though is the importance that it places on the three elements of colour, ie hue, value and chroma. We will talk much more about this but the lesson I learned from the book at that time was that these three elements have to be considered seperately both when painting objects and when designing whole pictures. The full implication of this has been the main subject of my colour study over the subsequent decades and I am really excited to have the chance of sharing this with you here.
Some good news - failure is vital!
Sometimes I wonder why some concepts took so long to penetrate my too solid skull, but the advantage of that long fermentation process is that now I understand thoroughly the problems people can have grasping the concepts which underpin good painting. When painting you need to spend more time thinking than actually applying paint to canvas.The most valuable lessons one can gain from a master artist are therefore insights into his or her thought processes. Not the what, but the why. This is why copying is so relatively easy, the thinking has been done for you. On this blog I shall be thinking out loud, no doubt sometimes I shall make mistakes, I have certainly made plenty up to now, but there is much to be learnt from mistakes and the successes ( which I hope will not be very scarce) often come when failures have been thoroughly absorbed. Dont be put off by failures, they are an absolutely necessary part of the learning process, but I hope by learning from mine you can make fewer yourself and have greater enjoyment on your learning path.
Talking with the masters
One of the joys of art which I really want to stress is that all artists face the same problems and we all have the same (limited) tools at our disposal to solve these problems. This applies not only to living artists but all the greats of the past that we so revere as well. Raphael and Michaelangelo had problems of proprtion, masses and colour as we do and worked hard to arrive at their own solutions. We can learn from them too and as a historian I love to think of myself as part of an ever continuing tradition, a long linked chain back to Giotto and earlier. If we approach these artists as fellow toilers like ourselves rather than god like figures on Olympus they can teach us a lot and I shall explore ways of learning from past masters throughout my blog. The museums and galleries of the world are a great resource for us and how lucky we are these days to have them all available to us at the click of a mouse!
Learning together
So this site is a record of my journey towards understanding how to make good paintings, but I hope it can be a valuable resource for you as well. We may travel at different speeds and by slightly different routes but we all aiming for the same destination. Please feel free to get in touch and share your thoughts about your experiences, triumphs and difficulties in learning to paint high level realism. Of course this journey never really ends, learning is a lifelong process, but therein lies its value. Nothing worth achieving is ever easy and as Ruskin so truthfully remarked “The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.” So please share your thoughts and experiences. I wish you happy reading and happy painting.