Letter to unknown recipient, no. 1

My dear, dear friend,

I can't tell you what pleasure it brought me today to receive Peterman's translation of Hautbrow's "Classifications" in the morning post. Things are dreadfully uninspiring around here, and I was in a terrific funk about it when your book came and instantly cleared the sky of dark clouds. The zombies still proliferate the streets, particularly on the weekends since, though they are quite beyond their former selves, the creatures seem not to have forgotten their routines. I dread to tell you that some of them appear to have found occupations for themselves in the service of the arts, to add more horror to the plague. Just last night, Maurice and I went to a zombie revue at the Royal. Some enterprising soul had rounded a quartet of them to sing and beat on things they brought with them from the street. They moaned in harmony and slowly drummed rhythms that, though off from each other, actually sounded something like polyrhythms, albeit every tune was a shuffle. All went well with the show, to be gracious, until a lady in the front row, overdressed and crowned with purple feathers, startled one of the freaks and he bit the ringmaster. Incorrigible Maurice was inspired, nonetheless, and he found an old zombie with dentures to come back to his studio and paint. Need I say that the resulting canvases fit neatly into the department of abstract expressionism? You can be assured that I scolded our dear companion for his transgression. I called the work derivative, just to annoy him, and pointed out that he was simply playing off the elephant paintings we saw in the colonies last summer. He moped and then set the zombie free, and hid in his studio for two whole days and nights, to excellent results. I have now seen his old prodigy corralled in Mrs. Cooper's garden, I suppose scaring off birds from the vegetable crop, which seems a fine vocation for the poor old corpse--the zombie, I mean; Mrs. Cooper is in fine health.

As always, with affection,

Exploring New York Modernism

In Albany, recently, I saw the large collection of modernist paintings and sculptures that's on permanent display in the state buildings. Nelson Rockefeller—J.D.'s grandson—brought the art to the state capitol in the 1960s and over half a century later, the work still resonates.

I've been thinking about this collection and, looking closer at the art, I've made some discoveries. I've found that the work has connections with important art traditions that some of our contemporary artists seem to have missed or dismissed. And I'm beginning to understand that my alienation from contemporary trends has something to do with my connection to the modernist art represented in Albany and the European traditions that fostered it, however subtly.

I'm not surprised that I feel a connection to the art at the Empire State Plaza. The collection includes abstract expressionism, minimalism, color field painting, and op art, and it hints at pop art. This is the work I grew up on. Within the first week or two of art school in Cleveland, I saw a large show of modernist sculptures from the New York School. It changed my life. A number of the artists I saw then are represented by work in the Albany collection.

But I didn't realize how important New York modernism was to me as a young artist in Cleveland in the 1980s until I started working on an MFA degree online at a West Coast art school. After getting a flavor of the West Coast's take on things, I can see that Cleveland is steeped in the same aesthetic and art history as New York City. These are the artists who taught my teachers and their instructors. And as I continued my undergraduate studies, and as an impressionable young artist, my teachers showed us this kind of work again and again.

But looking closer at the artist biographies confirmed something I've been suspecting for some time: most of the artists in the collection studied realism before turning abstract; many of them produced representational work before becoming non-objective. I think this is significant.

By the time they were chosen to contribute work to the collection, most of these artists were making non-figurative work. Aside from satisfying his modern tastes, Rockefeller probably saw that the non-objective character of the work was very safe for a space that is equal parts public, political, and industrial. But after reading the artist biographies, I realized that much of the work is rooted in academic sensibilities of objective content and realist technique. And the artists who were influenced by the more expressive styles of twentieth-century representational art created work in a similar fashion before turning to more pure abstraction.

This strikes me as a difference between the Albany artists and my teachers—and hence, me. My teachers and I are the first generations that began their studies, and their art making, directly from the standpoint of American Modernism—much of it quite abstract. Though we enjoyed being completely immersed in American modernism, most of the artists in Albany appear to have been born in other countries, or their parents were. Many of them studied in other nations, even if they were born here in the USA. So they were immersed in something very different before creating the work we see in the collection in Albany.

The collection of modern art in Albany illustrates what happens when artists make art in a new environment, drawing on well over a half-century of expressive modern art and long traditions of academic drawing and painting, as well as European, South American, and Asian cultural traditions. The artists in the Empire State Plaza collection brought these past traditions to New York City, and drew on them as they explored new territory in their work.

My teachers didn't study as much realism. They learned some representational drawing and painting technique, and taught us some. But we didn't have the opportunity to bring traditions from other times and places to a new center of the art world and create something uniquely American like these modernists did. We seem to have started where the modernists left off, without going through the process they went through to get there. And perhaps that's one reason we've been struggling with art in America since the 1980s.

The American vernacular that we see in the Albany collection reminds me somewhat of other American art forms that are derived from traditions across the ocean. Music, in particular, yields great examples in jazz and bluegrass. It's no wonder that Rockefeller and others wanted to share New York Modernism with the world as an example of American strengths. But it is worth remembering where our New York Modernism came from.

When Paris fell to Germany in World War II, and when artists fled France and many other countries to come to the United States, New York City became the center of the art world. Much of the work in Albany can be traced back to Italian Futurism and French Art Deco. The creative émigrés who settled in New York brought European abstraction and Surrealism and melded it with American mural painting that had risen in importance with the WPA. The new work reflected American ideals and Rockefeller was keen to re-imagine the modern art traditions from an American standpoint of industry, progress, freedom, and individualism.

A lot of the work in Albany, however, has roots in countries that did not share as rugged a view of individualism as we Americans favor. I am struck, in particular, by the formality present in the Albany collection. For the most part, the work contrasts with that very personal flavor of abstract expressionism that privileges introspection and subjectivity over universality. Over the years, the American spirit of individualism has produced quite a lot of art that is so arcane that the work can only be understood in relation to the personal vocabularies of the artists.

Most of the work in the plaza, however, can easily be read within a collective visual vocabulary. Some of the work can even be traced back to the constructivism of more socialist cultures. I find this to contrast with some of the prevailing trends of self-absorption that I see in much of our contemporary art.

Rockefeller, himself, was very interested in international art. He was active as a philanthropist in France and Greece. He brought French architecture to New York and used ancient Greek concepts in Albany. He approached Matisse, Picasso, and Rivera for the mural commission that eventually went to Jose Maria Sert. He collected European art, which he brought to his office in the Capital and to the Museum of Modern Art in the city.

Rockefeller was shrewd enough to seize the opportunity to appropriate European modernism, encourage its transformation into something uniquely American, and then gift it back to the world. For Rockefeller, the concentration of New York City artists in the Empire State Plaza illustrated that the State was the center of the art world, and showed how international the State was.

The paintings and sculptures in the Albany collection illustrate how long-standing traditions in art can be transformed in innovative ways into a new art form that is uniquely American. But, somehow, I think, this transformation must have been a little too radical for us who followed. Somehow, I think, we may have lost touch with some tradition in our inheritance of modernism.

Perhaps the freedom of modernism made it too easy for us to be lazy with the fundamentals we learned as young modernists in art school—fundamentals that became ends in themselves instead of means to working through difficult representational compositions. W.H. Auden said that our ears crave familiarity while our eyes crave novelty. Maybe that's why visual arts have strayed so far away from the traditions that fed them while jazz and bluegrass seem to me to have kept some of the flavor of West Africa and Ireland. Or maybe it is because the options for visual artists seem so easily to bleed beyond the rules.

The Empire State Art Collection reminds me that, however new and innovative this work was half a century ago, the rules still mattered to the modern artists in the collection. Classical realism, European modernism, ethnic traditions, and centuries of culture fed into this work. And for me, it is validation that my insistence upon constantly revisiting traditions outside my training is worthwhile, and that there is a reason that objective content and the art of other cultures resonates with me in my own work: it was present in the work I cut my teeth on, no matter how simple or abstract it seems to be.

When American art gave us the freedom, in Rockefeller's 1960s, to make something as universal as a circle and call it art, it opened the possibility for artists to reject cultural and historical conventions. As a result, however, many artists are doing work that is neither related to a long tradition nor universal, and which reflects a highly personalized vision. The challenge for me, now, is to hold on to tradition while finding an American vernacular that speaks to me and that I can speak through so that my work genuinely communicates my experience in twenty-first-century America, and does so in fresh and innovative ways.

Earth Pigment Palette

Last summer, I posted a lesson plan for making a color wheel starting with secondary colors. Today, I'm going to demonstrate making a color wheel using just earth pigments.

I made this wheel using black iron oxide, a couple caput mortuums, a couple red earths, haematite, and several ochres. I added a little bit of beech charcoal to the deep blue on the right and I also mixed in titanium white throughout. All the earth pigments are essentially iron oxides. The medium is acrylic.

You can make a complete color wheel using just iron oxides and white. Iron oxide comes in yellow, orange, red, violet, and black. The black can be lightened into a blue by adding white. That's how I got the blues above. And then you can mix the yellow oxide or the red oxide with the blue to get green or violet. That's how I got the greens above. The violets in the wheel are caput mortuum and black iron, but I could just as easily have made them with black and red.

Here are some iron oxide pigments I formed into round pastels to draw with. You can see the huge range that we can get with iron oxides.

A good project for students is to make a color wheel like the one I made using yellow oxide, red oxide, black oxide (Mars Black) and a white.

Then they can make a painting using this limited palette. They can use oil, acrylic, water color, or gouache.

I made this painting using just terra rosa, yellow ochre, a mars or ivory black, and titanium white. Four pigments was all I needed.

Some dry earth pigments don't mix well with linseed oil. Since I used acrylic for my wheel, the dry haematite, caput mortuum, and one of the orange ochres worked okay, but these three in particular have trouble getting along with the oil. It doesn't stop me from playing with them, however. I love playing in dirt.

Qualities of Oil Colors

It seems like collectors will buy almost anything at an art auction, but a couple things remain very constant: collectors like something that fits in the home (often a large home) and they look closely at the quality of the materials used. It's important for artists to understand how oil paint works so that paintings are dry in time for shows and so we are sure the paintings won't fall apart on the wall.

It's also important to know about pigments so that the art is visually effective. In my recent paintings, I've limited myself to a palette of earth colors that works for me and I'm constantly learning about these pigments. There are a lot of things to consider, so it makes sense to limit your palette so you can get a handle on all the characteristics of your paints. I'm a rule breaker, so I need to know how far I can push things. In this post, I'll define the qualities of oil colors that affect the way paintings are made and how they look.

Color

The kind of pigment you are using affects many characteristics in your paint. The most obvious is the look of the color itself. Chemists have developed ways of categorizing both visual color and pigment chemistry, but the best way to determine the paint color is to get used to the paints that are for sale and look at your paintings under various lights. I make charts and color wheels. After you buy and use enough paints, you will have your favorites and you'll hope that they never go off the market.

Color Names

You can't tell what you are using simply by reading the name a paint company gives a tube of paint. Two tubes with the same name might be made from different pigments. Or similar pigments can have two different names. Some paint colors are called hues, which means that they look something like the real thing but are cheaper. A Cobalt Blue Hue looks like a Cobalt Blue but doesn't contain cobalt.

A lot of paints are no longer made the same way as the originals. So an Ultramarine Blue today might not be the same kind of Ultramarine people used a long time ago.

Color Sources

Paint pigments, today, come from two sources. There are natural pigments that are collected from nature and there are synthetic pigments that people make in a workshop or laboratory. Even the ancient Egyptians made synthetic pigments, so there's nothing wrong with them. Sometimes they are much better than natural alternatives.

Pigment Types

There are also two basic types of pigment compounds. The first type is the organic pigment. These are carbon-based, meaning they are usually derived from plant or animal sources in nature or they are chemical dyes when synthesized by people. It's easy to confuse organic with natural. But, as in "organic chemistry," organic pigments are those that contain carbon. They can be natural or synthetic.

The second type of pigment is an inorganic pigment. These are the earth or mineral pigments. Inorganic pigments can also be either natural or synthetic. They essentially contain metals such as cadmium, cobalt, manganese, aluminum, and iron.

Occasionally, the distinction between organic and inorganic might be unclear. For example, Sienna contains iron and also, as a clay earth pigment, contains decomposed plant matter. Another example is Graphite, which contains carbon but is considered a mineral. Maybe that explains why a graphite pencil falls between charcoal and silverpoint in character.

Particle Sizes

I prefer the way inorganic paints look. They have much larger particle sizes, usually, than organic paints and I think that makes a difference. Some of the synthetic organic pigments are so pure they look unnatural and garish. They seem to have a "chemical" look. If you glaze with an inorganic pigment that is roughly ground, you can even get a nice grainy look to the paint. I suspect that earth pigments are rougher on my brushes, though.

Shade

One of the main characteristics of color is shade. Unless it is really neutral to your eye, each color has a bias toward one of its two surrounding hues on the color wheel. This undertone color is the reason you can buy, for example, an Ultramarine Blue (Red Shade) or an Ultramarine Blue (Green Shade).

Temperature

Directly related to shade is temperature. It's a good idea to have a relatively warm and cool pigment choice for every hue. For example, you might have a red that is more magenta and a red that is more orange-red. If you have a cooler and warmer choice for each hue, then your mixing possibilities are better. Temperature is also very important for constructing lights and shadows.

Value

Nothing is more important for rendering form than value. You have to step back from your canvas to note the relative lightness and darkness, or luminosity, of your paint colors. This is because your pupils will open up when you look at a violet and get smaller when you look at a yellow. So, to your eyes, everything becomes a middle value. In reality, however, when you step back, you will see that the violet is very dark and the yellow is very light. It is important to mix your colors on a grey palette instead of a bright white one, or you will have trouble seeing your values.

Saturation

Saturation is the intensity or chroma of a color. Essentially, this means how vivid and bright it is. Some colors are intense. Some colors are dull, muted, and greyed. Some fall in between.

Tinting Strength 

When you are mixing your colors, you will find that each has a relatively stronger or weaker tinting strength. I have some reds that require only the tiniest dab of paint to significantly change another color I add it to. Tinting strength depends not only on the kind of pigment, but also on pigment load, which differs by brand; some brands mix a lot of oil with less pigment and charge less.

Density

Density is the mass of the pigment. If you buy a tube of paint, it is measured in volume, but if you buy just the pigment with no binder, it may be measured in weight, instead. A denser pigment weighs more than a pigment with less mass in the same size tube. Pick up a lead white at the store and you will feel the difference (then put it back on the shelf and buy a nontoxic white). A tube of inorganic pigment will usually weigh more and may also be more opaque.

Opacity

Opacity, or translucency, is the covering power of a paint when placed over another color. A paint may be very opaque, semi-opaque, semi-transparent, or transparent. Opacity and other characteristics can be affected by the pigment's density and particle size.

Oil Content

In the process of creating a usable paint, some pigments require more oil than others. People sometimes use a measure of oil absorption to describe the amount of oil added to a pigment. Of all the characteristics, oil absorption seems to be the most vague in documentation online, even though oil is the essential property of oil paint. It might be easier to think of fat or lean paints in terms of oil content. This simply refers to how much vehicle is likely to be in the paint—the oil to pigment ratio out of the tube. Oil content doesn't necessarily relate to the thickness of the paint.

Some oil paint has more oil in it and some has less. Though some manufacturers add more oil so they can save money, the amount of oil in the tube depends somewhat on the qualities of the pigment. Some pigment particles mix or suspend well in oil and others are difficult to combine with oil. I've found that some pigment and oil mixtures will change in viscosity when left to sit or when stirred. Also, some oil colors seem leggier than others: you can get long strokes, almost like lines of ink, with some pigments, while others prefer to work with shorter strokes.

Some paints require only a small amount of pigment to color the paint, and so require a higher ratio of oil. Some pigments are dense and soak up a lot of oil. Other pigments don't need as much oil to make a paint. Some pigments help the oil oxidize and dry, while others do not. Furthermore, oil itself can be fatter or leaner depending on the kind of oil. Manufacturers may also add inert ingredients like calcium carbonate as a thickener and binder, and this will affect the oil content in the tube.

As you paint, you will want to thin your paints with more solvent and less oil at first and then gradually increase the oil you add and decrease the solvent. How much of each you use depends upon the paint you are using. You can determine the oil content by working the paint with a palette knife or brush and getting a feel for fatter and leaner paint.

Utrecht makes a white that reminds me of printing ink. It's great for adding highlights in the last stages of a painting. This white contains titanium and zinc like other whites, but in using it, I found it to be way fatter than any of the other whites. So the fat and lean qualities of individual paints vary quite a bit by manufacturer. Oil content, along with characteristics of a pigment, affects workability, drying time, sheen, and the likelihood of the paint chipping and cracking.

Film

Without experimenting and doing more research, it's hard for me to say how the paint film is going to turn out in the long term. As a grad students, my cohorts and I have spent most of our time starting paintings. When we finish one, we usually turn it in still sticky. Even though I've done hundreds of oil paintings, I've yet to varnish any of them. As a result, we spend very little time studying the surfaces of finished work. In general, however, the dried paint can be hard or soft. It can be hard and then crack, or it can be soft and then crack depending on how flexible or brittle the paint is and what is under the paint. Or it can turn out just right.

On a side-note, if you have to roll a painting, roll it with the paint side out. It's counter-intuitive, but the reason is that the paint stretches or contracts over time depending on how the painting is rolled, and you want to roll it so it heals back to normal when unrolled. If you roll the paint side in, then you will crack the paint when you unroll it to a larger surface area. The same concept goes for leaning a painting on board against a wall.

Aside from cracking, crazing, and chipping off, the paint film can yellow due to the content of linseed oil, and it can be spongy if you use a cheap oil that doesn't oxidize right. If you are desperate to get the paint to dry and it won't, even in the sun, you can resort to spraying it with Bullseye shellac every day for a week and the solvent may sink in and oxidize the paint all the way through. It's better to avoid this, however, since the paint may crack. With the right paints, your painting can be dry in several days.

Gloss

You may want to use some kind of varnish on your painting. Wait a number of months after the painting has dried. One reason for varnish is to protect the painting. Another is the fact that different paints dry to a different degree of gloss. Some paints dry shiny and glossy while others dry flat or matte. Gloss is also affected by the surface you paint on. I did a number of portraits directly on hardboard without any primer or gesso. My teachers would have been very annoyed if they knew, but I loved the way the oil soaked into the board. It gave me a drier, oil-pastel or egg-tempera look. And I loved the faster drying time and the fact that I could build up gloss as the paint got thicker.

Drying Time

Some paints dry faster than others. Some of the organic reds take forever. I once threw away a study that still had reds that were as wet as the day I painted them a year-and-a-half earlier. I wasn't sure which brand of red I had used, but I had my suspicions and haven't used it since. Some pigments seem to stay wet a long time. On the other hand, some of my handmade earth paints are so dry, they are almost like pastels. You can dry your paints faster by putting the painting in the sunlight.

Permanence

Once a painting is dry, most conservators and artists recommend getting it away from sunlight as it can fade the colors. Some pigments are lightfast but others are fugitive when exposed to light. Conservators can remove frames from old paintings and see how much the paintings have faded by comparing the paint hidden under the rabbet. But you can find ways to avoid this problem by using quality paints with excellent permanence ratings. Some organic pigments, particularly those that are plant-based, are very fugitive. On the other hand, my local museum has very, very old pieces painted with what looks like indigo but they don't look faded at all.

Toxicity

As much as we take care of our paintings, we also have to take care of our health. No oils are nontoxic so artists need to always consider safety when working with painting materials such as solvents, mediums, and pigments. Use extra care with those labeled toxic, and avoid toxic chemicals altogether if you can. In the next post, I'll show how you can get a very large palette just out of earth pigments and iron oxides, which are all nontoxic.

Aside from choosing safer solvents and paints, another good practice is to keep the turpentine covered and clean your brushes only when you are finished with a painting session, instead of cleaning every time you want a new color on the brush. With oils, you can wipe the excess paint off and go straight for another color without cleaning. The little bit of muddying that happens won't be really visible, but it will actually strengthen the painting by mixing the colors every so slightly. And you can start your cleaning with an oil or lactate instead of turpentine and finish your cleaning with a brush soap instead of going crazy with the turp.

Conclusion

As a graduate student in a very challenging painting program, I've found myself constantly studying the chemistry of paints and pigments to get a better handle on my tools. Some people say that inorganic pigments behave one way and organic pigments behave another way. In the end, it's more important to know what characteristics to look for in the paints on your own preferred palette.  While settling on my favorite brands and colors, I've explored the eighteen qualities that I defined above, and I think that should give us a pretty good picture no matter what pigments we use.