Having spent much of last year learning about pigments and buying various artist oils, I tried some of them here. The colors chosen here do not represent those of my grainy photograph of South Manitou taken on an overcast, grey day. They are fantasy colors chosen to be vivid. This is when my love affair with manganese blue began. Hélas, manganese blue is no longer mined.

Blockx already sell as manganese blue a mixture of different pigments, a phthalo blue with white.

PB15:3—Phthalo Blue and PW4—Zinc White

Fortunately, it appears that Old Holland can still sell PB33 if one has the faith that the back ordered PB33 will materialize..
.
PB33: barium manganate + barium sulfate

Have you ever squirreled away products before companies ran out of them?

oil on maple panel, 40 cm x 50 cm

Improvised from a photograph this winter taken near Otter Creek in the Sleeping Bear Dunes.

Colors were mixed from Ultramarine blue, Manganese violet, Turner yellow, Chinese Lake, white and black. None of the mixtures displayed even the slighted hint of green.

Having gained some experience with choosing and mixing pigments, I consider, that a next, fruitful step in learning to be a better painter will be to follow Cennini‘s advice and practice drawing – daily.

Rough surf paints in black sand.

Starting this post, I thought that I would not dare to take these sand paintings of a Great Lake as motifs for my own oil painting. That was similar to my attitude towards a ‘stone painting’ done by the same Great Lake a few year ago with its receding water. The dropping water level exposed rocks arranged in wondrous ways. These stone people are now again submerged – mysteries in the sculpturing of the lake shore.

Thinking more about the sand paintings shown above, I am beginning to think that, with my increasing expertise, a few years from now, I may dare to portrait them, not in their exquisite detail, but rather in a more abstract fashion. That way, I would, in my own small way, follow the footsteps of such giants as Rothko and Turner, but doing so without permanently reducing my mind with, as my students now euphemistically say ‘substance use’ rather than ‘substance abuse’. In the meantime, interested in color interactions, I still have to learn a lot.

Is there a cycle of ‘colore versus disegno’ in a person’s life time as well as throughout the centuries?

A meditating duck in the Banter Lake outside Liselotte’s cabin in Wilhelmshaven.

The color that I chose for painting water in Northern Germany differs from my usual Lake Michigan color mix. Today, it consists of Ultramarine Blue, Dioxane violet, Titanium White and Zinc White.

I paint water, June paints the desert. Do you also have a proclivity for a particular motif or theme?

1

A week ago, late Sunday afternoon, I finally made it out to the semi-wilds, a place I’d never been, though not far from known territory. I was hoping to get to something interesting by snowshoe, which can actually be an easier way of traveling than by foot in summer. You don’t have to step or climb over all the obstacles, just walk above them on the nice, white carpet. The photograph above shows the main stream, Hyalite Creek, near where I started off. Admittedly, the water’s not entirely black, thanks to the foam and spray from turbulent spots. But where it runs smooth, it’s dark, dark, dark.

I soon left the stream at the first minor tributary, and ended up spending all my time along it, taking the series of photographs from which selections are presented below:

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

The usual issue for me with such images is how far to abstract from the gray world—there’s very little color here, even before processing—toward a binary opposition, not unlike Jay’s white stake in a black heart. Because I liked the turbulent streamflow, I wanted to emphasize it more than in a “naturalistic” rendition, like the version below of #7 in the series:

On the other hand, I didn’t want to take the contrast all the way up to the fantastic or surreal, as in the version here:

I do admit to liking, in the last one, the way the water is converted into astronomical imagery, not unlike the special case of the spray in Stardrops. But somehow, at the point where I am in this work (and all of it is still unsettled), it just feels overdone. I’ll go a certain distance from reality in my tendency toward abstraction, but I’m not ready to let it out of my sight.

How about you? How far do you go?

Update: I’ve renamed this series Dark Water and put it on my web site with a brief statement.

a more comprehensive view:

another close-up:

Bringing out the edges?

As a ‘sharpening’ freak, conditioned by microscopy in my day job, I reflexively ‘smart sharpen’ or ‘unsharp mask’ my images. Particularly, as my zoom lens with its very convenient range does not give the sharpest telephoto images.

A first attempt at general sharpening of the above images to accentuate the watery reflections produced an overly garish look. Therefore, I decided to selectively sharpen the mirroring to my heart’s content.

Two decades ago, during the time that I visited exhibitions of Richard Estes’ paintings with their cityscape reflections, I often scrutinized watery reflections of the hilly Long Island Northshore, wondering whether one could manage to capture them in a painterly photorealistic style.

How demanding would it be to portrait reflections as the ones above using oil painting?