Painting and the Art of Unlearning

Ralph Oberg, one of my two favorite painting instructors, often drilled into my head that being a successful painter was more a process of unlearning what we think we know about a scene so that we can learn to see what's really there.

He was talking about landscape painting en plein air but it applies to every other representational subject matter too.

What did he mean by this?

If you see clouds as white, pine trees as always green, or mountain as always brown, Ralph's words are for you. As far as color goes, in our minds we often create an association between an object and a color:

• Apples are red
• Oranges are orange
• A tree is green
• An egg is white
• An asphalt road is black

It's not our fault - we are taught these things from the time we're small children and unless you're an artist, you never really have a reason to see things any differently. But if you are an artist and paint those big, puffy clouds in a blue sky as pure white, they will likely look wrong to you. 

Why?

Pure white looks wrong because a cloud really isn't white. A cloud is made up of tiny little droplets of water surrounding small particles of dust. They have no inherent "whiteness" of their own. These little water particles are rather dense (ever fly through clouds in an airplane??) and reflect and refract light from all over the scene. We need to throw away what we think we know about clouds in order to paint them in a way that looks "right" for the landscape we're painting.

In my painting of "Corona Arch," the clouds are not pure white even though it may appear that way at first. The undersides are a mix of colors: permalba white, burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, ivory black, and a little cad orange.

The lighter areas are a mix of white, cad orange, and likely a little lemon yellow and perm red medium thrown in. No pure white. Why?

The color-temperature of the light that day was really warm. It was mid afternoon on a June day, probably 105 deg F, and the rocks were baking. The afternoon sun had an orange cast to it. The light reflected off the rocks onto the trees and clouds was also warm...you can see that captured in the undersides (dark sides) of the clouds. I wanted a sense of that warm orange-y light to suffuse everything in the scene as it did when I was there in person.

Pure white, especially titanium white, is inherently "cool" in color-temperature. I knew the light parts of the clouds needed to be light, but they needed to be quite warm too. That's why I added the orange, yellow, and red. Once the highlights were thrown into the orange color range, they looked "correct" for the colors going in the rest of the scene.

Something else you might notice in this painting is that the shadow areas are full of lively color - they're not black as we often see in photographs. Why? Your eyes don't normally see shadows as black because they are better than a camera at capturing a wide range of tonal changes. The camera's tonal range, in contrast, is quite limited, so if the camera exposes a picture for the light areas, often the shadows will revert to almost-black.

When I initially came upon this scene on a hike I painted a small on-site oil sketch of it. My eyes saw the shadows as full of warm, lively color...unlike the photos I took of the scene (my camera made the shadows tend toward dark purple when I exposed for the lights). When I painted the larger version back in the studio, I tried to reproduce those warm shadows as much as possible, pushing them to strong red in some cases. It worked and is very faithful to the glowing red rocks and canyons of the area around Moab, Utah.

So next time you're outside enjoying a nice day, whether or not you're painting, take some time to look around you. Try to forget what you think you know about a scene and see the colors for what they really are. Do you see the reds and oranges in the conifers? What color is the grass in sunlight vs. shadow? Are the green trees reflecting green onto the undersides of the clouds? What color is the pavement in light and shadow? And have fun unlearning :-)

Painting ("Corona Arch") copyright Nancy Rynes, 2010. Prints available...contact me via email for more information.