Supreme Paint - The Blog

This is an unusual post for this site as it is not about painting! I just wanted to post a picture of the new hand printed packaging, as each order comes in I am printing the boxes by hand, therefore each is unique, the box is also 100% recycled.

Packaging is an area Supreme Paint want to push as far as possible making receiving our paints an experience. I was once told the lengths the Japanese go to with packaging and the thought and care which is given to the process, so look forward to new developments over time, for now here is the latest incarnation...

Charles Bargue lived from 1826 to 1883 and is almost unheard of today, he was a man who was very highly skilled in drawing and painting but never reached the heights he could have in his art.

Perhaps he is better known for putting together portfolio of drawings for the French publisher Goupil & Cie, this was around the time they had just sacked a young Vincent Van Gogh who was training as an art dealer. The drawings by Bargue were intended to be a course in drawing, in the way that the rapidly fading ateliers (traditional French schools of painting) had been teaching, this course of study being almost an apprenticeship in drawing and painting.

In my opinion this is badly lacking in art education today, it is fine to paint from an abstract point of view and create completely new dimensions in paint and mark making, however I feel this should come with some substance as painting and drawing are both crafts and need an understanding in technique and materials, really in order to push the boundaries further. 

M.Bargue has enabled people to take up this traditional practice of study in our own homes in and for that he deserves a great amount of gratitude. The portfolio of drawings of 197 drawings he produced were designed to be copied as closely as possible, taking into account every dimension and every tone and through this process rapidly developing drawing and observation skills. The portfolio was initially published around 1865 they were used by both Van Gogh and Picasso in their early days.

Above is a Bargue plate, this is from further on in the portfolio and generally they are arranged in order of complexity.

The Bargue plates became very popular and were used worldwide for around fifty years until this academic, traditional way of learning to paint and draw fell massively out of fashion in the early 20th Century and then they disappeared, unavailable for the best part of 100 years.

Then in 2003 they were published again as the final part of a massively challenging project to find and restore all the plates, which brought back the full set of Bargues, unfortunately due to the huge effort in putting together the book and small print run it sold for around £100. The reason for this blog post is that it has been republished this year and is available for around £20 which is incredible value for the amount of knowledge it can impart on the self taught painter, it is available here.

I managed to get hold of a copy a few years ago and over a year worked through it diligently, it is very demanding and requires a large amount of concentration however it completely changed my ability to draw and it also changed the way I saw the world, giving me a much keener eye for detail and proportion. It is not to be undertaken lightly and when you are in the middle of a drawing which has taken two weeks, sweating over the tiniest detail you really question it's value, but when you finish and your hand eye coordination and perception of volume, proportion and size are transformed.

 

It is not for everyone, however I personally cannot recommend it enough and it really does change the way you see things so even if traditional academic painting is not your thing it can still be immensely beneficial even to a completely abstract painter. Don't be put off by how complicated some of the drawings appear, it is just a matter of time and patience to do exact copies of them.

 It does help to get the plates blown up in a photocopy to get the dimensions down properly on paper and towards the end refer to the book for the details, the book teaches the method of sight size drawing which when learnt properly is incredibly powerful. The painting below was executed by a painter trained in sight size drawing, and I will  post further on this technique soon.

 

'Reality is merely an illusion' – Albert Einstein

Since the beginning of the human race people have wanted to explore the world around them and also understand the matter of which it is made, they have consistently compartmentalized, labelled and broken down nature down into smaller groups and smaller parts in an attempt to find the building blocks of life and matter. To find the root of life and matter through science.

Psychologically this need to organise and name is straight out of the left hemisphere of the brain, the site of the language centres, the ego and our analytical and logical processes. Our creativity and intuition reside in the right hemisphere. To me there is a fascinating area in painting and in perception where the differing outlooks of these two hemispheres of the brain come together.

This phenomenally complicated diagram is illustrating how all the living organisms link together on planet earth and is a perfect example of humans desire to compartmentalize nature, humans are located on the line 'you are here'.

We know oil paint consists of pigment and oil, but what is happening on a deeper level, what is happening when the little packets of light or photons which come through flying through the ether, often from the other side of the universe, strike, crash, and bang into the into tiny particles of pigment suspended in the oil.

Maybe its just me who can visualize being surrounded by this world of intense, constant subatomic activity, but the more I learn about particle physics the more my perception of the world changes. In this pursuit of understanding matter scientists discovered and categorized the element and then the atom and at the time this was thought to be the smallest part of the material world, the word atom comes from atomos meaning' that which can't be split'.

Scientists carried on this journey plunging deeper into subatomic (literally below the atom) physics, with the naming and identifying of the electron, the proton and the neutron, deeper still with quarks and neutrinos and many other subatomic particles and all the while these discoveries are being made they are getting more abstract, harder to define verbally and more out of line with our traditional view of the world.

Particles which can predict the future, particles which travel faster than light and single particles which can be in two places at once, these are all recent, proven, genuine scientific discoveries. Currently it is felt the entire universe is constructed out of a consistent flowing and evolving energy and the particles and the building blocks of matter are a man made diversion created out of the desire to split and label.

This means as a person you are constructed at the most basic, deepest level of the same energy which the stars are made of, the person who is sat opposite you is made of the same energy as you and the air between you and that person is again made of the same energy, giving a vision of total boundless connection. On the deepest level of particle physics the boundaries we take from granted don't really exist, the wall isn't solid it is actually 99.9999999% nothing, interestingly scientists do not know what the nothing is. Maybe the nothing is what we call God, or as called in the Eastern world, Chi or maybe just nothing.

Why has this got anything to do with painting? Because in viewing colour you are witnessing this shift of energies and particles occurring right before your eyes, you are witnessing as clearly as is humanly possible quantum physics in action, before it goes submicroscopic, mathematic and abstract. Your ability to view colour is governed solely by the interaction of these subatomic particles.

This flow of electromagnetic energy, the photons of visible light by chance interact with the surface of the pigment, some of these photons are absorbed and changed into different subatomic particles and some of them are bounced back and reflected into our retinas and converted by electrical impulses in our visual cortex into a thought which somewhere in our conciousness gives the illusion of colour. At the same time alongside the scientific flow of energy and stimulus you have a right brain hemisphere triggering of feelings and intuition beyond words and reason. When you are looking at colour the two hemispheres of the brain are operating nearly in unison, science and feeling meet.

To illustrate the right brain reaction, imagine looking at beautiful sunset when it goes beyond words and reason into something else, this is where painting is at its most powerful, describing scenarios where words fail and generating deep instinctive sensations which we can't describe. Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Francis Bacon they all understood this, that is why their work is popular because it connects on a very deep instinctive level, they managed to capture the 99.9999999% of nothing.

As an aside I recently listened to an interview with a brain surgeon, he had been practising for around 40 years, and he still could not understand on any level how conciousness could exist in the lump of jelly he spent most his time poking around in.

I love where the boundary where of the world of science collides with the feeling, intuitive, artistic part of our world, and I think they are getting closer and closer all the while, we live in an interesting time.

Vincent Van Gogh sketch of a Mulberry tree

It is the physical, scientific aspect of the interaction between light and pigments which I am now going to look at. Our best attempt at classifying or defining colour is the spectrophotometer this gives highly accurate readings of the light being reflected back from a sample, however mostly this information is of little use to the painter it does not tell us how opaque the paint is, it's tinting strength or many other physical qualities which the painter needs to feel and judge subjectively. 

Nearly all pigments are crystalline in structure, and it is this structure which dictates the colour, the slightest variations to this microscopic form will change that colour, changing the amounts of light wavelengths absorbed and the amounts reflected.

The cadmium range of colours are made from cadmium sulfide and to get the large array of cadmium colours the artist has available, the sulphur element is replaced with increasing amounts of selenium, which basically changes the structure of the crystals giving different levels of absorption of light and therefore different colours, cadmium pigments can be taken from vivid yellow to black all from essentially the same material.

The transparency or opaqueness of a colour is down to the pigments ability to scatter light, there are two factors involved, the pigment particle's size and it's refractive index. Refractive index is a measure of how much light bends as it travels through a substance, the bigger the difference between these two qualities the more light is scattered, and the more opaque a pigment appears to be. This is much the same as driving through fog with your headlights on and the light does not go 'forward' as usual but is spread out and scattered by the water droplets.

This is interesting when you think of an opaque paint which will cover other paints, it is not thicker or completely covering the paint below, it just scattering the light to such an extent no light reaches below in order for us to register a different colour, our eyes are deceiving us.

An extremely close up photo of a Rembrandt painting, showing the complexities of opaque and transparent layers, and the genius of the man.

Generally as the pigment particle gets smaller, the paint gets more opaque and has a higher tinting strength, however there is a point in decreasing particle size where the paint starts to become transparent but carries on increasing in tinting strength, this can be seen in one of the most fundamental pigments to painting, the iron oxides. It can also be seen in Titanium white one of the most opaque paints available, it is made from Titanium Dioxide and a one centimetre wide crystal of Titanium Dioxide is completely transparent, as it is ground down it becomes completely opaque, if it were to carry on being ground to an even smaller size the paint would become transparent again.

A lot of the nuances and subtleties of paint come from the impurities within them giving us masstone and undertone, this is where a thick layer of paint exhibits a different colour to a thin layer, I love this complexity and the fact that it comes from an 'impefection' of nature.

If you have a sample of paint with 990 crystalline particles of a yellow ochre iron oxide and it has 10 particles of natural silica within it, unbelievably our brains can interpret this microscopic difference in terms of colour perception, obviously we can't see the microscopic particles and count them, but we see the overall effect is different because of them, we can see them but we can't see them!

As an aside when you start to look into perception it is fascinating, the brain is constantly editing what we see, judging what is the most important and ignoring a lot of peripheral information, mainly because there is too much information to process. It also jumps to visual conclusions, it is faster for the brain to process information this way. If you look at an orange and you see a round and orange object, then the brain concludes it is an orange without looking at the details this works most of the time but not always. I feel knowledge of these perceptual processes helps to remind us not to stop looking carefully, and not take from granted what we see, which is particularly important as an artist.

I have tried in a roundabout way to explain what is happening with your paint at a level normally we do not consider, it becomes even more amazing the deeper you go but I will have to leave that for another post...

"Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else, by colour." - Cezanne

After Painting and Colour #2 which gave instruction on creating a colour wheel, this post is about using that colour wheel and delving a little bit into some of the critical relationships which exist between colours, which are fairly essential knowledge for the painter.

The two terms I would like to write about are analogous and complementary. First let's look at analogous and rather than explain it now, below are some images showing examples of these groups of colours.

For me these are a pleasure to look at, somehow soothing to the eye, these four groups of colours are analogous. In terms of the colour wheel, colours next to each other on the wheel are called analogous and these have a natural harmony. The wheel exercise in the last blog was composed of only twelve separate colours, now imagine a wheel with hundreds of colours and you would have many harmonic analogous colour combinations.

So apart from pretty colour combinations why is this of any use to the painter?

When you paint or indeed when you observe anything, you are looking at the light, which enables us to perceive the objects around us. The object or our surroundings would not be visible without the light, this sounds obvious, but what I really mean is when the light hits the surface of an object, some of the electromagnetic energy is absorbed and some is reflected, our brains then interpret this as colour and form.

Obviously there is different coloured light, indoor light from an incandescent bulb is very yellow, Northern daylight is cool and blue. These different coloured lights colour the world around us, for example inside a room lit with artificial light everything we visually perceive is tinged yellow, outside in Northern light everything is tinged slightly blue, this gives us nature's analogous colours there is a subtle harmony in all the colours. To paint convincingly even in abstract painting, some knowledge of this phenomenon is essential.

When you are painting you are painting light, nothing else, just light.

Using the wheel you can look left and right to see these analogous colours, and this can inform you to make good decisions about your painting and to achieve some of these subtle harmonies.

The second aspect of the colour wheel and probably the most important is complementary colours. A complementary colour is the colour opposite on the wheel, the complementary of red is green, blue is orange and so on, with many subtleties within this.

So again what is the use of this in painting? Other than creating extremely vibrant contrasts (you can usually spot complementary pairs because they have that vibrating effect on our eyes as seen above), well again if we revert back to the real world around us, the red you see is unlikely to be as rich and vibrant as the red straight out of a tube of cadmium red paint, in technical terms the colours about us have less chroma, basically less colour.

This is because many of the colours in our environment are mixtures of many colours and not pure, they are also affected by the colour of the light and also all the colours around them. More scientifically most of the objects around us are not just reflecting back one wavelength of light and absorbing all the others, it is much less defined than that and in reality all the wavelengths representing different colours are reflected back to some extent and our brains and eyes can perceive these subtle differences. In painting by using complementaries we can reduce the chroma of colours, basically reduce the level of colour we perceive, more in line with the real world.

The above illustration shows this perfectly, as the complementaries are added to each other the mix heads towards a grey in the middle. With paint this is often quite subtle and the levels vary with different colours and pigments so a good deal of experimentation is required, though for me this is one of the pleasures of painting. It is quite possible to create colour charts of greyed colours stepping them down through the different stages of 'greying'.

Please see painting and colour #1 for more information on how to do this, if this was done with all the colours in use on your palette it would be a fantastic reference resource.

Once you start to look for these two qualities in the real world, analogous colours and 'greyed' colours, they will become more and more apparent. Knowing about these effects raises your visual awareness and enables you in an artistic way to see more clearly.

In my opinion although there is craft and skill in painting, the majority of painting is about how we perceive the world around us and how that differs and corresponds with our fellow humans view of the world, the great painters look harder and more precisely.

I have taken a break from my painting and value blog series, to highlight some very good art books.

First is the book which motivated me to learn how to paint, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh . This is an unbelievable and moving collection of letters written by Van Gogh mainly to his brother Theo, who supported him greatly financially and emotionally throughout his career.

The above image is a couple of pages of his letters, you get an insight into how and why he worked, it is unprecedented and unlikely to ever be equalled as a record of an artist, if you had no interest in painting or art, this is still fascinating.

The second book I have chosen is much more specialist although continuing the Dutch genius theme, it is Rembrandt The Painter at Work, this was written by 'the' expert on Rembrandt, where it differs though from a dry historical text is that the expert Ernst van de Wetering was trained as an artist and has a painter's fascination with his subject.

He has totally dismantled Rembrandt's technique and presented it in this book, it has incredible closeups of his paintings and you can start to see how he achieved some of his techniques. For me this is important because I don't there ever will be anybody as good as Rembrandt at manipulating the texture and surface of paint to give the illusion of 'life'.

Third is a classic text on painting, the interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester it can be a difficult read, and I had to read it a few times, also a lot of it isn't very enlightening, however there are some very special gems in there. The really fascinating parts are where he describes his efforts to convey sensations and reality in his work, and for me conveying reality is the only point of painting, not reality in a photo realistic way, but reality in feelings, sensations and the stuff beyond words. To achieve that in painting is what it is all about, that is why people are still interested in painting because it has the ability to go beyond purely the visual onto a different level evoking feeling and sensations. 

"If you can talk about it, why paint it?" , "I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being." - Francis Bacon

Next up, number four is absolutely completely and utterly different, the cover is terrible and the title totally off putting. However there are no better practical guides to painting, it is a series of about fifty questions covering where your painting may have gone wrong,it includes shapes, light, value, depth, etc. Each aspect of painting is illustrated by a painting by the author, some of which are poor reproductions but it gets the point across. It is a very useful tool to self critique your painting, by applying each question to your work. The book is Problem Solving for Oil Painters by Gregg Kreutz.

Another great book along these lines is by Richard Schmid called Alla Prima, it is very good, rammed full of practical information, however I struggle to recommend it strongly as it is self published and is hideously expensive being about £70 for the paperback. I suppose though you could easily spend that on a course and you would learn nothing like the amount of information which is in this book.

I am going to end this particular list with another classic, it is about drawing, which for me is the basis of painting and the place to start, and this is the book to start with. What also makes this book special is how it teaches you about psychology at the same time, and how to activate the creative areas of the brain while dampening the more egoic, word based parts, which generally will make you happier as well!

Drawing on the right side of the brain by Betty Edwards.

I would love to hear any suggestions to add to future lists...

Value in my opinion is one of the foundations to great painting, and possibly the hardest part to master. However like most things in life simplicity is the key. Live simply, paint simply!

This is a two part post focusing on drawing in this part, then moving to painting in the next.

Value in this context is the visual tone of something, below is an example of a value scale.

This value scale is white to black in ten steps, each graduating into the next, although in this particular one the step from the darkest grey to the black is too wide.

When I began learning to paint, for a long time drawing was my focus, before I picked up a paint brush I did drawing after drawing. In pencil or charcoal drawings the values are pretty easy to see, it is amazing when coming to the end of quite a complicated drawing to see how the slightest, really imperceptible adjustments to the value have massive effects particularly to the feeling of depth and aliveness. 

As mentioned the key to a powerful drawing is to keep these values simple and to a minimum. John Singer Sargent was a true master of controlling and manipulating value, he suggested to aim for using only three values, maximum four, if you have five values in a drawing it is lost.

I can't recommend enough buying this book of Sargent's portrait drawing it is reasonably cheap and is a master class in value in drawing, there is very little text just good sized images of his drawings, below is a drawing from it.

And another!

He makes it look so simple, the following quote is also a useful piece of advice;

"If you begin with the middle-tone and work up from it toward the darks so that you deal last with your highest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents." - John Singer Sargent

Classically in the atelier system of learning, students drew from strongly lit plaster casts, which makes the values much easier to decipher, this is undergoing quite a revival currently, particularly in New York. Below is a fine example of a 'cast' drawing.

In my opinion one of the leading institutions of this form of learning today is the Grand Central Academy , I have to warn you though if you look at the website you may want to go to New York to join up! Below is one of the student's drawing, again following the principles of simplicity. 

Apart from keeping it simple and the number of values to a minimum, it is highly effective to show a full range of values i.e. from white to black. This is pleasing to the eye, the contrast exciting the visual cortex of the brain.

In the drawing above the full range of values is very clear, another very powerful technique seen in the drawing is to mirror this tonal contrast in nature of the line, with the highly rendered face to very loose sketch of the head, beautiful.

For me where this drawing transcends is in the extremely subtle middle tones around the forehead and cheeks. They are very delicately handled, the 'aliveness' in a portrait drawing is in the middle tones, they pleasingly convince our perception we are viewing real flesh, until the rational, left part of the brain kicks in to say 'no it's a drawing'.

To summarise, although I am going to return to this topic as there is a lot to see and comment on, I believe there are two aspects of value to focus on;

1) Have a full range of value from light to dark

2) Keep the number of values to a minimum 

My next post will comment on value in painting, and the undisputed heavy weight champion of the world in this field was Michelangelo Merisi o Amerighi da Caravaggio, or more simply Caravaggio.

Apart from his painting it is well worth reading a biography on him. He was a genius and lived a crazy, rock and roll lifestyle, he went on the run twice and was sentenced to death but survived. When commissioned to paint religious painting for leading figures of the catholic church, he used well known prostitutes as models within them risking instant death, he had an unprecedented Europe wide following of fans, I could go on...

However I will just end on one of his magnificent paintings - The Incredulity of St.Thomas. Don't forget to look for the use of values in it!

Painting and light, when I first started painting I had heard that artists had a preference for the quality of light and the 'right' light. I felt as long as I could see clearly it was fine and the quality or temperature of light was of no importance, I started painting in a small attic room with average artificial light and found no problems, happily mixing my colours and as I was painting realistic still life carefully checking my mixes against reality and again finding no issues.

Then one day I brought a painting downstairs, into the daylight and I was shocked as the colours I had so carefully mimicked appeared completely different and looked odd and unnatural, I realised in that second the importance of light and paying attention to it. The light I had been consistently working in was warm, yellow and soft, and the daylight was cold, blue and hard, and that changed the colours in my painting dramatically. 

However this experience triggered something much greater in me than that simple realisation, in that moment I questioned what  am I actually perceiving on a daily basis and what is light? Maybe this is an experience everybody goes through after studying things visually for a long time but it felt very profound.

I quickly learned that the information we receive through our eyes is processed in our brain to become the colours we see, in other words the colours we see are in our brains not in reality! This makes total sense when you think about it. 

What our brains interpret as colours are actually different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, and the percentage of electromagnetic radiation we can actually see is almost zero percent i.e. 99.9999999% of this energy we can't see! I hope you are following this, basically through evolution or a quirk of fate, the world we perceive is created by our brains, based on a tiny slither of what is actually occurring around us, the vast majority of which we have no awareness of at all.

So what is the rest? All this led me rapidly into learning more, the fields of particle physics and quantum physics seemed to have the answers, I felt the cutting edge of physics would tell me all I needed to know and answer my question; if everything I perceive is 'created' by my brain, what actually is the world around me in reality? 

I read more and more, and basically this is the story..

The deeper scientists go into matter to discover what it actually consists of and what is happening, the less they know, the more questions they ask the fewer answers they have, and the science of physics starts to crumble, everything they took for granted has started to collapse. When analysing the behaviour of the smallest particles they can currently find, the particles do not behave like anything else before, they can transmit messages faster than light, they can seemingly predict things before they happen, there is no language to describe what is actually happening. Even the language of physics, mathematics becomes so abstract it is almost irrelevant.

And for me this is the circle closing, there is no language suitable to describe what is happening at the cutting edge of physics, or to describe what 'reality' is and that is exactly the same when I see a Rembrandt in the national gallery, there are no suitable words to describe why it affects me like it does, there are no words to describe watching clouds on a sunny day or your children playing together.

It is a visual world, words can't come close.

Painting has given me this insight, and my motivation to paint is greater than ever.

p.s. this is a photo is taken from a bubble chamber, it is one of the few ways to record the movement of subatomic particles, the swirls are subatomic particles flying off at light speed and then either transforming into other particles or colliding with another particle. This is going on right now, billions upon billions of times in everything around you, including you! And exactly the same is occurring at the other end of the universe!