Your Eye's Favourite Colour

Photo: Winsor & Newton

Like many people, I am fascinated by green in all its many shades — perhaps not surprisingly, since the human eye is said to detect more shades of green than any other hue. As Vision Boutique puts it: ‘Each primary color resembles or matches up to a specific wavelength. The color blue is at the bottom of the wavelength range, while red is at the top. Right in the middle is, you guessed it, green. The center of our visual range or visual spectrum is where our perception is best. So, green is the color we see the easiest.’ Just as interesting is the meaning we assign to green — the subject of an article on the Winsor & Newton website. Among other things, we learn that the sitter in the Mona Lisa painting is wearing a green dress, and that this signifies her probable status as gentry, since the nobility wore red. Presumably the nobles wore other colours as well, but if you were showing off for an oil painting, you’d want to wear the top colour permitted to your rank. Sumptuary laws, which govern who may wear what, are always interesting. How lucky we are that we can wear whatever colours we like, and decorate our homes with them, too. I certainly don’t qualify as gentry!

It has been written that the English painter and engraver, Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) was not very fond of green. I’m not sure that this is really true, but it may be that he had a talent for seeing the less obvious colours in any landscape. It may be that amateur observers of nature paint a lot of green because that’s what they expect to see. Even when one wants to show something as very green — such as my Bucida buceras of the previous blog post — there’s usually a lot of complexity. My twinned trees were painted with six or so different green shades, from near-black to sherbet green (and I added black for depth). I also added a touch of orange beneath some of the green to incorporate observed colour (in the tiny flowers) without actually making the orange visible. But really, I stuck with green, and just made it highly varied. The lawn below, by contrast, is just one stick of hard green pastel lightly applied. In any case, I do love using green, and looking at it!

Evolution of portrait of Bucida buceras, perhaps my favourite tree

Original painting. Soft and hard pastels,on a light grey PastelMat ground.

I have painted this tree — this species — so many times, I’ve lost count. I have painted and drawn many trees, from pitch pine to chestnut oak to tuliptree, but the Bucida buceras is the one I love most. It has tiny elongated leaves, in clusters of five or so — it is wonderfully delicate. And yet its ‘habit’, its pattern of boughs and general swag of motion — gives it a fabulous drama. It looks like a tree heaven-sent for art nouveau. I love it. And this painting shows a close pair, seen in my neighbourhood: delicate, elegant trunks and branches, reaching up to support frothy yet substantial sun-kissed foliage, dotted with minute green-gold flowers. Bucida buceras is a tropical tree from the Caribbean that grows quite well in southwestern Florida.

Anyway, when I first did the picture, I I didn’t want fussiness, so I declined initially to give a background to the trunks, or any further detail than an oasis of single-green ‘grass’. I wanted the trees to gather one’s gaze and go no farther. But I missed a feeling of warmth in the picture — in my mind’s eye, I saw a delicate sunrise. So eventually that’s what I painted: see below. This gives a better sense of balance, instead of the picture being top-heavy, as it was before. And it balances the cool blues and greens of the sky and foliage. I also added some dark purple to the shadows within the trees, and to the deeper greens — again, too add a complementary element. This was also added to the green below. My aim is to be naturalistic but not precisely realistic. The picture still has a slightly dreamy, out-of-this-world quality, and I like that.

In praise of green

According to Winsor & Newton, ‘The average number of colours humans can distinguish is around a million. This varies such as with colour blindness or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, with ‘tetrachromats’; rare individuals with a genetic mutation who can see up to 100 million colours. However, what humans do have in common is a shared ability to recognise variations of green better than any other colour.’

One of my books on the wonderful early-20th century artist, Eric Ravilious, claims that he didn’t much like the colour green, and found ways to get around using it in his Sussex landscapes. I’m not sure, looking at his art, that this is true — but even if he didn’t want to swath his paintings in green, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t like green.

I love green, and I’m always looking for the right combination of greens to put in my pictures (and well as the right combination of greys, blues, and warmer colours).

I’ve become something of an appreciator of celery in recent years — a vegetable I spent most of my life considering as expendable and completely boring. I rarely used it. Now I put it frequently in salads, in the chicken roast, in our dog’s dinner. It’s nothing less than a staple in our household. And I now realize that most of the celery I’ve ever eaten was past its peak of freshness, and had lost whatever green intensity (and nutritional value and bright flavour) it might once have had. A very fresh bunch of celery is intensely, beautifully green. We got such a bunch the other day, and I was so delighted with it, I put it in a vase by the door and photographed it as if it were a bunch of flowers. Here’s to the beauty of green!

Why I love Yupo 'paper'

‘Reflections in rain’, Amanda Payne, 2021. Watercolour marker on Yupo paper.

Yupo is a super-smooth semi-glossy substrate for artwork, made entirely of polypropylene. For this reason it can be reworked almost endlessly, and because the surface doesn’t absorb moisture, there are all manner of interesting effects that you can achieve with it. I discovered it only recently, but I have been working with it every day for weeks. In my experience so far, just about any type of paint, ink, marker or pencil works well on it. (I do tend to steer away from watercolour markers, because they leave a sheen that may not be desirable.) The only medium that really won’t work on Yupo — without putting down some sort of gripping material first — is dry pastel.

As a visual artist, my pictures are always aiming for four goods:

1. To keep and create a sense of air, light, and space. Practically, that means reserving white or bright areas and suggesting their presence in other parts of the picture (with reflective surfaces, chinks in pigmented areas, etc.).

2. To use precise strokes to suggest different textures, appropriate to the figures I’m painting: strips of bark on tree trunks, drops on umbrellas, the prickliness of certain foliage, the look of feathers, hair, fur, stone, and so on.

3. To model and bring my subjects alive with compelling and vivid colour. It is one thing to introduce neutral, earthy, or muted colours. It’s another thing altogether to have muddy colours, which convey opacity and darkness without charm.

4. To be readable: to make the scenario I’m showing delightfully and easily comprehensible. This is why I usually work from greater abstraction to finer detail. My privet hedge, for instance, may start out as a series of criss-crosses in various dark greens, but it will eventually be resolved with a different brush into something more leafy-looking. Therefore my paintings develop in layers, and what comes before and after in the process interact with each other to create the final result.

For all these reasons, I have fallen in love with Yupo paper! It allows me to put down very precise marks, working quite small as I do (typically on sheets less than 8" x 10”) ; it allows me to lift colour, shift colour, and layer colour as I like; it easily permits the reserving of white areas (or the putting-in of them, later); it responds well to water and other solvents; and the pigments one puts down remain vivid. It is a serious art substrate for serious artists — and that, for me anyway, was truly unexpected. And as a real bonus, I never have to stretch the paper or concern myself with preventing buckling. This is a paper that water loves!

PERYLENE VIOLET: My new favourite colour

As a visual artist, and as someone fond of mottoes, mine could almost be: ‘If it works with water, I like it!’. That is not strictly true, however: I have so far steered clear of acrylics, on the one hand — and on the other, I do like pastels (but I have been known to use water on occasion with pastels, as well). And this is why I was happy to add gouache, or what the English used to call ‘body colour’, to my repertoire. I’m still exploring it, but I find it works beautifully on nearly all the occasions when I would otherwise use watercolour. And my goodness, the colours!

Check out this beauty. The pure colour is in the round well at bottom — man, it looks like a gemstone! — and on the strip of white Yupo paper (100% polypropylene) lying across. The swatches at bottom left are various purples, with perylene violet at the far right edge, for comparison. The colour above that well is a mix of Van Dyck brown and perylene violet, creating a nice ‘shade’ version of a truly gorgeous hue!