Mini Eggplant

7/24. Mini Eggplant, oil on linen on panel, 3x5 in.

Another old one, out of order. I don't know why I didn't post these eggplant pictures. I really like this one—I think I was able to really stay connected and aware, or, I think the way my friend Gary once put it, to do the best painting I could at that particular moment.

Eggplants

7/23. Eggplants, oil on linen on panel, 6x8 in.

A piece from way back in summer before the mango, done over several nights. (What I remember is,) the first night I couldn't really get into it, partly because the big eggplant had a coloring that was a cooler purple than the skinny one and that I had trouble zeroing in on; moreover, I couldn't figure out how to "draw" the complicated striping on the big eggplant.

On the big eggplant especially, I found myself going back and forth between rendering form (the dullish, even spread of light) and surface gloss (the clean, juicy shadow tones), which process was complicated again by the busy stripy pattern.

The second session was either the next night or two nights later, and the third session a few nights after that, so that the skinny eggplant (which was already getting mushy) had enough time to undergo some natural transformation. A few of these "changes" I left out because they were either difficult to add on top of what I had already painted or because they were simply very unappealing. My backdrop must not have been simple or solid enough because I played around with some different colors (blues, greys) and was unsure how to keep it.

At some point I had gotten a tube of aureolin (cobalt yellow) because Williamsburg and others mention its use "in some of Turner's skies." I had taken to using Indian yellow because of its transparency but wondered how the cooler aureolin would work (good enough for Turner!), so I tried some of it in the yellow background at the third stage. I found it to be much greener than I would have liked and spent a lot of time trying to undo the experiment (it's quite strong), perhaps overcorrecting towards the too-hot—and making another example of excessive chroma syndrome, or whatever they call it. I don't dislike it though; and as far as the baffling stripy pattern goes, I was satisfied enough with the somewhat impressionist treatment of it (good enough for me).

Mango #2, and Color in Old English (Part 3)

7/30. Mango #2, oil on linen panel, 5x5 in. SOLD

I had long wondered what was meant by "red gold" in medieval literature. Was it, like so-called red or rose gold today, simply a colored gold alloy? If not, why was it called red? Of course, the answer to this might have to do with what the color "red" once meant.

A cursory explanation was offered by Nigel Barley in "Old English Colour Classification" (Anglo-Saxon England 3, 1974). His theory of Old English colors states that they were centered on a light-dark axis, and that a few colors had derived from ancient horse color terms (which Earl Anderson would later elaborate upon) - these special colors were normally used of "animate" things, or else to describe some other-dimensional aspect of an object's surface. But despite this over-ruling ancient "binary opposition" of light and dark, hues sometimes were distinguished, even if, on the hue axis, the Old English colors didn't line up with our modern color system. Barley gives a table, like the one below, that shows "how simple is the solution to that most perennial of old disputes in Anglo-Saxon - the use of read to describe gold" - we see that the Old English colors read and geolo once lay in different places on the spectrum from those of modern English "red" and "yellow":

..Modern English....Old English
.________________ ________________
(................!................)
(......blue......!................)
(................!.....hæwen*.....)
(————————————————!................)
(................!................)
(.....purple.....!————————————————)
(................!................)
(————————————————!.....baso*......)
(................!................)
(......red.......!————————————————)
(................!................)
(————————————————!.....read.......)
(................!................)
(................!————————————————)
(.....yellow.....!................)
(................!.....geolo......)
(................!................)
(————————————————!————————————————)
(................!................)
(.....green......!.....grene......)
(________________!________________)

*Hæwen and baso were not basic-level color words.


Barley writes, "Recourse is often had to highly ingenious and learned explanations urging that gold in medieval times had a relatively higher copper content and that it was consequently redder than modern gold. We are told that the adjective was used only for the alliteration or because it had become a set phrase. As elsewhere, such explanations lack an anthropological perspective and so fail to realize that Old English 'red' is not our red and that we cannot blandly equate the two categories." While Barley's explanation considers the "variation from culture to culture in the position of boundaries," Earl Anderson suggests we also determine the possible focal point of the color red in Old English. He writes,

The virtual universality of 'red' as a semantic category is a linguistic by-product of the artistic and ritual use of ocher among primeval human cultures the world over. Ocher is a clayish soil containing hydrated oxide of iron, with colors that include yellows, reds, and browns. Iron ore is found also is found in the purer forms of red hematite and yellow-brown limonite. Ocher, hematite and limonite in pulverized form often were used as pigments by ancient man. The colors of these ores can be intensified and darkened by heating them and by mixing them with water or with some other liquid.... The material culture, ... considering the early importance of ocher in it, may very well be the motivator of 'red' as a basic color term in languages around the world.

"Contributing to the reputation of 'red' as the color par excellence is the extraordinary stability of *rud^hró- (together with its northwest variant *rowd^hó-) in the Indo-European languages," he says; *rud^hró- possibly is a loanword from Sumerian urudu 'copper' from Sumerian *burudu, "which gave the Euphrates river its ancient name[.]" The connection to copper or ore can be found in Latin raudus, pl. rudera "piece of copper, copper coin," Russian ruda "ore." *Rud^hró- is found in the Greek erythros and Latin ruber. The variant *rowd^hó- appears in Baltic, Celtic, and Germanic languages, e.g. Lithuanian raudas, Old Irish ruad, Welsh rhudd, Old Norse rauðr, and Old English read (and noun rudu "redness").

Anderson goes on, "In the Iliad, [erythros] is used for the color of copper as well as of blood, wine, and nectar.... For speakers of contemporary European languages, 'red' has its focal point in the color of fresh blood. We should take care, however, not to project this intuitive knowledge of red onto languages other than our own, for blood, copper and ocher all are possible candidates as the material basis of red." So red might have been more earthy than we are used to today (and possibly why Aristotle was against describing the dawn as erythros). The problem of "red gold" is made more puzzling, says Anderson, by the fact that "gold" (Germanic *gelto-) was derived from "yellow" (*gelwoz), but that it is

modified by 'red,' not by 'yellow' until later medieval times. [The 14th-century poem Wynnere and Wastoure has the phrase ȝalowe golde.] This certainly differs from the situation in the sixteenth century, when Thomas Cooper (1578) defined the verb flaveo, 'to be yelow, or of colour lyke golde,' and ... when Samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary (1755), defines ruddy as 'Approaching to redness,' and then gives, as a second meaning, 'Yellow. Used, if at all, only in poetry.' Johnson was thinking of Dryden's line, 'A crown of ruddy gold inclosed her brow,' a relic reminiscent of the Old an Middle English ways of describing gold, which by the eighteenth century had become forgotten to the extent that he didn't know what to make of it.

The modifying phrases used in Old Norse are raut gull 'red gold' and bleikt gull 'bright gold' (cf. OE blac [easily confused with blæc "black"]); Old Norse also has raud mani 'red moon' and et rauða 'egg yolk.' Among the twenty-eight times that read- is used in Old English poetry, the phrase read gold appears four times. Read- modifies gold about twenty-one times in the Old English corpus, and it modifies blod about twelve times.... Among the fifty-four times that rot 'red' appears as the most frequent color word in the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, eighteen times it modifies golt.

Anderson discusses the proposed solutions to this puzzle:

(1) The meaning of "red" was indeterminate. Some in the 19th century believed that primitive Germanic peoples had an underdeveloped capacity to see color, hence "red" could be used to describe gold. But this doesn't explain why gold could not also have been described as "yellow."

(2) "Red gold" was merely a poetic convention. This theory, mentioned by Barley above, was just an extension of another 19th-century idea that the severely limited palette of the Iliad and Odyssey was a stylistic choice. "It is true that read gold is a verse formula, always appearing as a b-verse in Old English poetry; but beyond the poetry, read modifies gold sixteen times in prose or in glosses ... [and those examples] are not confined to any one formula. Moreover, the phrase 'red gold' continues to be used in Middle and early modern English, long after the potential influence of oral poetic tradition."

(3) Also mentioned by Barley is the theory that the gold of the Middle Ages "was often darker than that of our own, and contained a considerable alloy of copper," as W.E. Mead wrote ("Color in Old English Poetry," 1899). Anderson says that gold objects from medieval China do tend to have a reddish color, and that in Europe, since the time of the late Roman Empire, "the gold used in coinage often was alloyed with copper, but this was not normal practice for gold used in manuscript illustrations and for jewelry or precious objects." Although Anglo-Saxons only rarely used gold in manuscript illustration before 900, "[later] artists sometimes used it generously, and when they did, they used highly burnished gold, not only for incidental details, in a picture, but non-naturalistically to sectionalize or unify or frame a picture, and to brighten it." And while an inventory of Anglo-Saxon metalwork would indicate a number of gold-copper alloy objects, Anderson believes that

the Anglo-Saxons were more likely to safeguard the integrity of gold because of its greater value. In some prose texts, indeed, read as a color-modifier suggests the purity and brilliance of gold rather than its adulteration with base metals. This is the case with an anonymous homily De sanctio Iohanne:

Þu gelitenest swa read gold, ealra fugela king, Fenix gehaten
[You shine like red gold, king of all birds, called Phoenix]

... and again [in Ælfric's Catholic Homilies I] when St. John transforms a bunch of green branches into golden rods:

ealle þas goldsmiðas secgað þæt hi næfre ær swa clæne gold ne swa read ne gesawon
[all the godsmiths say that they never before had seen gold so pure and so red]

(4) L.D. Lerner, in "Colour Words in Anglo-Saxon" (Modern Language Review 46, 1951), had said that read was one of several color words (including brun, græg, and fealo) relating to brightness (or shininess?) rather than hue - so that read gold really meant "bright gold." This was just a revival of the theory that primitive peoples had a limited "color sense," and of theories like Mead's which describe an ancient preoccupation with light-dark contrasts - so that hwit often meant "bright" instead of "white"; brun when applied to metal meant "bright" with, as Mead says, "a suggestion of redness"; fealo of weapons meant "bright" and slightly yellow; etc. Barley argues the same point when he writes that the color system stressed brightness over hue. But, says Anderson,

However this may be, the range of referents modified by read in Old English is such that the word in itself could hardly imply 'brightness,' although it is true that bright things, like the sun or the sky or gold, and maybe even blood and wind, could be red. Among the items often described as read in charters are topographic features such as rocks or stones, especially boundary stones (17 occurrences), cliffs (7), ditches (8), a ridge (2), a path or road (14), a slough or wallow (7), a spring (5), stream (6), ford (7), or pool (3). Read, when applied to these referents, evokes an earthen or mineral color.

(5) Barley's solution, as we saw above, was that the places "red" and "yellow" occupied on the color spectrum were different from where we would put them today, so that gold was called read and not geolo.

(6) Another possible solution is the theory that

'red,' the color par excellence, has a close semantic association with 'color' in the sense of a 'covering,' exemplified by gilt, paint, or, in paleolithic and neolithic times, by fine red ocher dust sprinkled over a body in a funeral. In the phrase read gold, the essential idea is that gold is a covering; its chromatic value is secondary. For this reason, 'red' is preferred to 'yellow' as a modifier for gold ... In some languages, it is true, the taxonym for 'color' also means 'red': ... [e.g] Spanish colorado 'reddish.' In ancient and medieval Europe, red was a symbol in malo of evil, of the devil, and of a dreadful disease called "St. Anthony's fire" in the Middle Ages and Renaissance ... whereas in bono, red had protective power against evil.... According to this line of reasoning, red, as the color of blood, has a special association with sorcery or magic or the supernatural or the universal life-force and thus could extend to gold, the best of all metals.

But, although English "color" was a loanword from Latin color (rooted in celare 'to conceal'), the "closest semantic counterpart to color in Old English ... is hiw, which means 'color,' 'shape,' or 'appearance' but not 'covering.'" And with regard to magic or a universal life-force, Anderson says

the symbolic role of blood is ambiguous in medieval iconography. The wine ceremoniously consumed at communion symbolizes and becomes Christ's blood, shed at the time of the crucifixion as the basis of mankind's salvation. On the other hand, it is a medieval scientific commonplace concerning the blood of animals that 'heora blod is heora lif' [their blood is their life (Ælfric's Catholic Homilies I)], in contrast to human beings, for whom life consists in the soul rather than in blood. There is, after all, then, no particular connection between 'red' and sorcery or the supernatural in Old English.

Of these six possible solutions to "red gold," Anderson says that Nigel Barley "is right if all he means to say is that the Anglo-Saxons thought of gold as read rather than geolo." Anderson suggests a "larger theory," that

Old English read and its early Germanic cognates preserved the semantic range of Indo-European *rud^hró: the colors obtainable through the artistic preparation of ocher and hematite: red, reddish brown, orange, and reddish yellow. The reason for 'red gold' rather than 'yellow gold' is, quite simply, that read is mainly earthen, mineral, or metallic in its focus, whereas geolo focuses mainly on the colors of vegetation, and resembles grene in this respect.

The conceptual challenge that 'red gold' offers has two parts: the semantic range of 'red' is comparatively restricted compared to Old English read. 'Orange,' 'pink,' 'purple,' and 'gold' are basic colors in contemporary English, and thus are sharply differentiated from 'red.' In Old English, in contrast, these colors belong to the semantic range of read.... Leaving aside the biblical hydronym read sæ [Red Sea] which is just a translation of Mare rubum, the most frequent referents are topographic features such as cliffs, rocks, ridges and paths, streams, ditches, pools, mires and wallows, and herbs and nettles. The referents include blood, apples, peppers, grapes, clover, lips, the uvula, bodily wounds, and, of course, gold.

Anderson notes that information about relative frequency doesn't say much about the focality of read, but rather the subject matter of the material in which we find the word: the read paths and boundary stones mentioned in charters, the colors used in scientific texts, and the many references to the Red Sea in religious works are all "out of proportion to the probable use of read in the ordinary speech of the Anglo-Saxons. With respect to semantic range, however, [this information] encourages the belief that 'earth tones' are a canonical part of read."

In modern English, as noted earlier, the focal point of 'red' is something like the color of fresh blood, therefore we may tend to think that blood was the prototypical referent of 'red.'

It is quite possible, however, that the prototypical referent of the Indo-European word for 'red' was ocher, the earliest mineral-based pigment to be used universally by mankind. OE read was, in other words, essentially an earthen color, at least originally. The possible focal points include reddish brown, orange, and reddish yellow; the bright red of fresh blood is possible but improbable. At some early point in their history, the Indo-Europeans learned the use of copper as it spread from Sumer to other parts of the Fertile Crescent and beyond, and at that time, ocher may have been displaced by copper as the focal point of 'red'; this new foreign influence on the material culture may have found expression, as well, in *rud^hró- based on the same root as Sumerian urud 'copper.' No doubt the focal point and range of this word varied in time and place among Indo-European dialects, affected by changes in the material culture such as the introduction of shellfish or plant-based dyes and advances in medical and metallurgical technologies. It is impossible to prove that the focal point of OE read was something other than the color of blood, but two arguments favor this position:

(1) Of more than 260 appearances of blod- in Old English texts, it is called read fourteen times, and once rudig. Read is the color word most often used to modify blod, but fah~gefah, and sweart are also used....

(2) In the Old English Lapidary ... periphrastic descriptions of the blood-like colors of sardonyx [blode licost "most like blood"] and sard [luttran blode gelic "like clear blood"] are used, rather than read. If fresh blood were the prototypical referent of Old English read, one might have expected a phrase like *read blode gelicost, or possibly blodread which appears four times in Old English ...

These arguments are inconclusive, at best suggesting that we cannot draw firm conclusions about the focal point of OE read. It is possible that read has two focal points, one the color of freshly drawn blood, and the other a mineral color like gold - just as modern English blue has two focal points. We cannot be certain about that, but we can be certain that read was a basic color word whose semantic range included red, orange, pink, gold, and purple.

Elephant Garlic, and Color in Old English (Part 1)

7/13. Elephant garlic, oil on linen on panel, 5x5 in.

Lately as I struggled to mix the right colors - say, decent shades (or tints?) of neutral gray - I would think about what I "knew" so far of how English-speaking people a thousand years ago would have thought of colors. I had a vision of their world (or the world they wrote about) that was tainted by all I had read on the subject, and I'd accepted the view put forth by some scholars that Old English color terms not only stressed brightness over hue, but also denoted aspects of surface texture or reflectivity. Basic-level color names then were taken to mean also dull or glossy or shining or glimmering, and so on and so on - to the point that I carried around this image of an "ideal" Anglo-Saxon world that was in half-shadow yet had very clear glints here and there of spearpoints, flickering sword edges, and dull-gleaming helmets - a diorama whose details were sharply defined though kept at an unfathomable distance behind layers of dark, honeylike varnish. Just reading about anything related to Old English felt like focusing a microscope on an amber-encased world of smoky, raucous mead halls on one hand and silent, glittering swans on the other; a world of shimmering gold and ivory contrasted against bloodstains and dark, colorless ocean.

So in that world, somehow "brown" (brún) when talking of metal could also be translated as "shining" or "bright" or "flashing," the actual hue of a brown (and dark) sword often being disregarded even by some recent translators in favor of some shine-oriented meaning. Examples from Beowulf:

seax getéah / brád, brún-ecg
"drew her knife, broad and bright-edged" (E. Talbot Donaldson, 1966)
"pulled out / a broad, whetted knife" (Seamus Heaney, 2000)

sío ecg gewác / brún on báne
"the edge failed, bright on the bone" (Donaldson)
"the blade flashed and slashed" (Heaney)

brún-fágne helm
"the bright-shining helmet" (Donaldson)
"the burnished helm" (Heaney)

How could the color brown, which was often used as a synonym for dark even into modern English, also mean bright? (It was just part of an evolutionist theory of color perception, as I'll get to below.) One etymological explanation was that there might have been confusion at some point in the evolution of the Germanic word with a similar sounding verb meaning "to burn/fire," which could have resulted in brún having two opposite meanings. But if, as in these examples, the word suggested that objects of weaponry and armor had been burned or fired, then the resulting appearance would still be dark and not bright. A more down-to-earth explanation is that brown actually described the dark coating on steel that had undergone the process of "browning" to make it less vulnerable to rust. So it seems it was a hue term after all. And as it does today, brown ranged into lighter hues such as that of parchment, though it wasn't until the 18th century that it earned a place among "basic" colors and was no longer a subcategory of black.

I summarize this last bit from a great book, Earl Anderson's Folk-Taxonomies in Early English (2003), which is chock full of this kind of semantic analysis - I love the interlibrary loan system, by which you can get your hands on expensive books on arcane subjects for only the cost of postage, like it was a movie from Blockbuster; and Google Books, where I found the book in the first place (and where you can read much of it for free). I can't go too far before it just shows my need to read more, but for background I'll attempt to paraphrase some of it here.

Anderson defines a folk-taxonomy as "a hierarchical semantic system that lexicalizes a domain in human experience or in nature, such as colors, plant and animal life forms, seasons of the year, directions, or the senses." So, speaking of the semantic field of color (as our culture thinks of it), at the top of the hierarchy would be the taxonym, or general term, "color." At Level I are the so-called basic color terms, followed by Level II secondary color terms, Level III specialized colors, and so on. Following Anderson's example:

(0) Taxonym - color
(1) Level I, basic - black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, gray, purple, orange, pink, and possibly silver
(2) Level II, secondary -
crimson, scarlet, vermillion as species of red
maroon as species of red or brown
magenta as species of red or purple
aquamarine, turquoise as species of green or blue
etc.
(3) Level III, specialized -
Compounds like blue-green, red-orange, etc.
Comparative expressions like ash(-gray), chestnut, fireman-red, mahogany, etc.
Terms restricted to specialized semantic fields, like auburn, blonde, brunette; bay, palomino, pinto, roan, sorrel; ruddy, sallow, wan, etc.
(4) Level IV, more specialized, commercially coined terms used in automobile, cosmetics and paint industries, etc.

We are familiar with the notion of a supposedly "scientific" and unbiased color space representing hue, brightness, and saturation, but as Anderson sees it, "The scientific account is really just a refined elaboration of the modern western European concept of color." He adds that terms such as "piebald, pinto, and palomino cannot be described in terms of the scientific account of color. The expected response to this objection is that these are the names of patterns, not colors, but this is really only a way of marginalizing data that are inconsistent with a preconceived theory." He cautions that when trying to interpret an unfamiliar color system, it may not always be possible to make neat correllations to our way of seeing: "It might be misleading to assume that color terms in Old English are always lexicalizations or 'mappings' of the canonical trinity of hue, brightness, and saturation."

According to "mapping" theory, "languages are 'maps' of reality, and, although these 'maps' may differ from each other, they all relate to the same reality." Such a theory "assumes the intertranslatability of languages, such that anything said in one language can be said in another" - but anyone who knows a second language or has tried to translate between the languages of significantly different cultures knows this isn't true. Anderson therefore suggests that a language works not as a map of our universe, but of a sort of parallel universe. "Words do not relate directly to things as symbolic mappings, but they relate to each other in semantic patterns and systems that are approximately parallel to the interrelation of things in reality." We may also believe in the sufficiency of our language, but, however large a language's color vocabulary, there will always be a "poverty of names;" no language is sufficient enough to communicate everything and leave no semantic gaps.

To the hue-brightness-saturation color model, Anderson adds a fourth aspect: "focality." Folk-taxonomies (colors, plants, animals etc.) aren't all-inclusive hierarchies "capable of 'containing' all conceivable instances of a given category." Although, like scientific taxonomies, they are attempts to impose order on a messy world, they belong to linguistics and not science. He argues that the mind is less like a container and more like a searchlight, so we seek the places on which to focus. Focalizations vary across cultures, and across time, as the result of changes in material culture and the influence of other languages. Some cultures today focalize more or fewer basic colors than we do, and Anderson notes for example that Russian has two basic terms for blue, a "dark blue" and a "sky blue," both having equal significance in the color taxonomy (i.e., neither is a subcategory of the other); Hungarian has two reds, "a light red with a focus on orange-brown" and "dark red with a focus close to purple." Many cultures have what we call macrocolors, or more than one color categorized as one - the Dani people of Papua have only two basic color terms, a "macroblack" and "macrowhite."

Anderson says, however, that "the scientific account [of hue-brightness-saturation] is an excellent representation of concepts underlying the folk-taxonomy of color in modern English." So it is useful to us as a means to compare, e.g., the Old English color system with our modern English one. But again, we go wrong if we think that our only problem lies in matching names. That is, despite the familial relation between modern and Old English, our modern map* isn't congruent with the old one.... And this takes me back to what I had previously considered true about Old English colors. Today it is still assumed that the Old English terms stressed the colors' brightness/darkness or surface components, but why was that? And, on the other hand, so what? - I mean, how does changing from this incorrect interpretation ultimately affect how we see their colors?...

__________
_{*On the subject of maps, it is interesting to see how the Enlightenment gridwork system of cartography used by Lewis and Clark differed from the method used by the Indians they encountered. One system gives a direction-oriented and supposedly all-inclusive view from above, the other a route-oriented diagram showing many directions at once as well as relative distance and the importance of landmarks encountered along the route (features shared by today's subway diagrams).}

Mangosteen

6/12. Mangosteen, oil on linen on panel, 7x5 in. SOLD

I do realize how annoying it can become to see blogs you've gotten familiar with sit untouched for a long time, so I'm going to tell myself to snap out of it and get back to posting. (I blame my inner recluse, again, and will try harder to keep the little bugger from climbing back into my head through the broken back window when it's dark. Once he's in there he's quite the tyrant.)

We noticed mangosteens at our Kroger store one day and I just had to get some. Over a decade ago, during my last visit to relatives in Indonesia, I tasted this out-of-this-world fruit for the first and only time, fresh off a tree. I think they grew on a tree but I may be remembering wrong, as the memory would become like a vision and the taste like a legend completely detached from the reality of the experience. It probably makes sense that, after all the excitement of finding them in an American supermarket then getting to cut one open for my wife to finally be able to taste these mysterious things that I had for years been unable to describe in words, I (and she) was a bit disappointed. Maybe it was because they hadn't come to room temperature, or that they were mangosteens from Thailand and maybe different from the ones I had in Indonesia. And it didn't help that it cost $10 for only four of them. Don't get me wrong, they are fantastically and exotically tasty (or tastily exotic?), and to my two-year-old daughter they will always be exotic because honestly I don't see us spending that kind of money again anytime soon on fruits that don't contain much actual edible fruit. But to my wife, because I had spoken of them so often so mythically, they were only just so-so. Wanting to understand better all this hubbub over mangosteens, she looked around on the Internet and landed on this amusing article. Thank god we didn't pay $22.95 for two.

So it was maybe because I had this disappointment fresh on my mind, or I was worried that it was too expensive a fruit to have sit unrefrigerated for too long, but I think I began the painting hurriedly and ended up laboring too much on it, getting caught up in the shell-like hardness of the skin and the shifting colors. Not that it doesn't capture the feel of a mangosteen, but I feel the painting was slightly tainted by my feelings toward the thing.

Perhaps it was fortunate that at about this time I did some more little pieces for Cameron Gray (his new show at Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica opens tomorrow the 26th). It's interesting to see where my little tiles end up within a picture - in this piece from March (click "all sizes"), one of the more explicit ones forms the bright white of the girl's right eye. In all there are six tiles of mine - here's one detail. (Thanks to "C-Monster" for those Flickr photos.) Some of the recent ones, more innocent:

If I were teaching I might give students small challenges like these (working from reference photos), to help stay/get "fresh." I was amazed this time by how much quicker I was able to arrive at new color mixes, ones very different from what I'm normally used to. Serious "play" I guess.

Red onion

6/8. Red onion, oil on linen panel, 7x5 in.

I began to understand just before this painting what the difference between Mars and ivory black is. I never really thought much about black, always treating it as a minor hue (though it's not really a hue) unlike in the limited palettes where it plays a very major role; sometimes I'd use it only for making an already dark color blacker. (Usually when I said "black" I meant Mars, always believing it to be darkest.) Though I say Mars is blacker overall - i.e., it's opaque and stronger - ivory black is actually blacker, i.e., darker. The main difference is that ivory black is semi-transparent. So I thought, with my palette's dark hues being transparent (or semi-), would I generally want to go to a black that is semi-transparent as well?

I assumed mixing a transparent black with already transparent darks wouldn't have any real additive effect. In fact I didn't think about the subtractive effect it would have, i.e., the paint being too oily - as can be seen in the upper background of this painting, which was the result of switching to ivory black for a mix. Putting some Mars black in it towards the bottom made it stronger, but I left it mostly as it was here because it was interesting.

Avocado #4

6/3. Avocado #4, oil on linen panel, 5x7 in. SOLD

I don't have a good studio set-up with sunlight through a window; I had constructed a thing recently sort of like a photographer's macro light box/tent, using a white cloth to soften the light - something I had been thinking about coincidentally about the time I read Paul's comment way back - but I can't say yet how effective it is. Here I shone my lamp through a white trash bag.

Strawberries

5/19 - 5/22. Strawberries, oil on linen panel, 5x5 in.

These strawberries were still only halfway posted in "draft" limbo, when I saw the other day that my old teacher Jeff had done some as well. I can't say how good it feels to see his paintings online. It really takes me back. Not that he paints the same as I remember - in fact he described his recent Florence-influenced palette to me and it got me thinking differently about my own thinking. With Gary online as well I said it felt like we are walking the same halls again. The Internet is wonderful.

This painting is not illustrative of any new thinking, but rather how I haven't been doing much thinking while painting. I decided to take the in-progress shots of this piece when as soon as I realized I was having trouble with it, and if this is any lesson it shows how one could do things better in the beginning. These sessions were perhaps under a couple of hours each, plenty of time really, but the first night I failed to get the shapes right and I wasn't paying attention to even the basic light and shadow masses of the strawberries. Plus I got too much white/grey in everything.

The next night I tried to do better but still lacked focus - if you're like me, you sometimes do something without being wholly aware along the way, especially when you pre-suppose it to be easy - you can't paint subconsciously and effectively, apparently (at least in my case) not strawberries. The reds were giving me a hard time as always, and I knew everything had to be drawn better and I couldn't get around that. By this time the leaves were changing shape and mold had begun to show in places, which was upsetting because this batch of giant strawberries was probably the sweetest I've ever tasted.

I wanted to abandon the piece but a couple of nights later I went back into it. This time I arrived at a better sense of the form. Things finally were feeling round and I had had enough. I touched up the shadow area a little just before taking the last photo, but managed to somehow seriously mess up the darker red parts. So I was forced to unify the whole shadow area the way I should have in the first place - and it actually looks better, even if the end product is kind of stiff I think.

Management profoundly regrets and apologizes for the inconvenience and worries that have been caused; and Eddoes #2

5/6. Eddoes #2, oil on linen on panel, 5x7 in.


(in progress)

Well, I never thought I'd become one of those loathsome, horribly selfish people who could let their blogs languish for months with no explanation why. Originally I intended to stop for some soul-searching (whatever that means). I felt that I had been working too comfortably, that I still wasn’t getting at whatever it is I wanted to get at, if you get that. Most likely it started with my going to Charleston and seeing my friend and coming back and seeing a lot more great art online and getting annoyed with myself and with how I see (or don’t see) things. The old hermit in me said it was time to step away and hide out for a while, so I decided to put this (almost-)daily painting "project" face down and not feel too guilty about it.

I was telling myself I had to work out the composition of a new portrait of my daughter. Looking again at my old art history books reminded me of the enormous impact that Correggio, Bellini, and other Renaissance painters initially had on me, and it made me want to tackle something on a little larger scale in which I could play around more with light, do more subtle things. But I maybe just got more overwhelmed looking at more good stuff. And that portrait of Breagha never got started.

As my friend Gary put it, sometimes "life happens" - I found myself sidetracked by non-art projects (e.g. building a shoe rack for the narrow space by our front door, putting up some shelves, rearranging our computer work area). At some point though I helped do some tiny paintings for an artist in Southern California named Cameron Gray, who puts together these large mosaics with photos of body parts, food, and such things as reference (see a past show). Here are some:

A few of these are for a piece in a show opening July 26th from 6:30-8:30 at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica, Bergamot Station. I find/found painting these to be great practice (matching value and color), even if I normally wouldn’t force that sort of thing on myself.

My hiatus hadn't exactly been a vacation, though I must say it has been nice after the kid's in bed to once in a while spend the rest of the evening in the same room with my wife, and not at my easel. And a lot of times I would get lost in a book about falconry or abstruse Old English stuff (which relate to the portrait I want to do), but sometimes I'd just watch news and get mad at the political coverage, which just meant that I was in a worse comfort zone and that I needed to get back. Time the dragon awoke and came out of his barrow....

So, back to the eddoes above - I can’t remember when, but one night at least two months ago I had started painting them, and they then sat there patiently waiting to recapture my attention. So the other night I finished the painting - though by this time the little things had shriveled considerably (getting moldy underneath) and were sprouting real thick, sharp-looking green shoots. It was hard to overlook their present condition and rely more on my memory for some details, but I did my best.

Long Sweet Pepper

2/19. Long Sweet Pepper, oil on linen panel, 5x7 in.

This was two hours or maybe a little more. The shifts in the red of the pepper were tricky; I always have trouble with red as making it go lighter can easily take it too far toward orange or pink. And after everything the camera flattens it all out.

Valentine's Day Cake

2/16. Valentine's Day Cake, oil on linen panel, 5x5 in.

Instead of giving my wife a store-bought cake on Thursday, I made her a small heart-shaped one and let Breagha help sprinkle the red sugar on top (though she was more interested in licking it off her hand). We took a picture of it and on Saturday I thought I'd paint the last piece before it was gone. I quickly came to believe that, despite anything I used to think of Wayne Thiebaud, only he could capture the fake-colored sugar and shortening essence of a cake. (If anyone is wondering, the stuff at the top of my painting was my crude attempt at the plastic wrap.)

Bosc Pears

2/13. Bosc Pears, oil on linen panel, 7x5 in. SOLD

From a post on everything2.com,

Before the Middle Ages, the pear had been considered a superior fruit to the apple. By the end of the Sung Dynasty (China, A.D. 1279), over one hundred varieties of pear existed while there was but one apple. This preference for the pear carried over to Greece and Rome as well. A discussion of fruit growth by the Greek writer Theophrastus included grafting and cross-pollination techniques for pears alone; in Rome, Pliny the Elder described 41 varieties of pear, while only three types of apple were noted.

Bosc Pear

2/10. Bosc Pear, oil on linen panel, 6x4 in. SOLD

I forgot to upload this after my Gary post. Interestingly, there is a Charleston connection in the story of horticulturist Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc, the pear's namesake. I found the following today on the website of the Illinois Mycological Association, of all places:

Bosc grew up in France, and spent only a few years in the U.S., arriving in Charleston, South Carolina in 1796. As with many mycologists of his era, he was not only interested in fungi; he investigated and published on a wide variety of organisms. Mémoires sur quelques espèces de Champignons des parties méridionales de l'Amérique Septentrionale is his only work on American fungi.

In addition to his natural history works, Bosc also "edited" An appeal to impartial posterity: or, A collection of tracts written by her during her confinement in the prisons of the Abbey, and St. Pelagie, in Paris by Mme Roland (1754-1793), wife of the Minister of the Interior, who, as you can see from her dates, did not survive her imprisonment. The Appeal was directed at "her only daughter, deprived of the fortune of her parents by sequestration." I put the quotes around "edited," above, because I assume that Bosc did little besides smuggle the manuscript out and shepherd it through publication. N.S. Weber & A.H. Smith (1985) say that when Bosc came to this country, it was to put some distance between himself and "an unfortunate love affair." I certainly hope that it was not with Mme Roland; having your lover guillotined in the Red Terror is certainly one of the more awful ways to end a relationship.

And one of the messiest...

Mango

2/6. Mango, oil on linen panel, 5x5 in. SOLD

According to the Golden Artist Colors website,

The story of Indian Yellow pigment seems more like myth than fact. In the Bengali province of India, farmers raised herds of cattle fed only on mango leaves and water. The urine from these cows – bright yellow in color – was collected and dried to produce the pigment for Indian Yellow. Unfortunately, the cows were extremely undernourished, as mango leaves did not supply the cattle with sufficient nutrients, and they lived for only a very short time. The process was considered inhumane and, since 1908, Indian Yellow pigment has been prohibited from the market.

Wikipedia says, "In Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer's patron remarks that Vermeer used 'cow piss' to paint his wife." Actually, if true, the practice described above would have been inadvisable to begin with, as mango leaves are toxic and cattle in India are sacred. Also from Wikipedia,

In her 2004 book Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Victoria Finlay examined whether Indian yellow was really made from cow urine. The only printed source mentioning this practice is a single letter written by a Mr. T.N. Mukharji of Calcutta, who claimed to have seen the color being made. Aside from this letter, there appear to be no written sources from the time period mentioning the production of Indian yellow. Finlay searched for legal records concerning the supposed banning of Indian yellow production in both the India Library in London and the National Library in Calcutta, and found none. She visited the town in India mentioned in Mukharji's letter as the only source of the color, but found no trace of evidence that the color had ever been produced there. None of the locals she spoke with had ever heard of the practice. It is possible that Indian yellow came from another source, and that the cow urine story was fabricated by Mukharji, but came to be accepted by later authors. As such, the viability of producing Indian yellow from the urine of mango-leaf-fed cows is unknown.

Grapefruit

2/2. Grapefruit, oil on linen panel, 5x5 in. SOLD

I fought with the grapefruit's surface colors, going around in circles trying to make the form more solid. This was just under two hours I think. I'm happy with the coloring overall though, and am ok with where I decided to leave things. A teacher once labeled me as a colorist (based on the few things he saw me produce, he added) and I'm always glad to have some decent colors if nothing else.

Onion #5

2/1. Onion #5, oil on linen panel, 4x4 in. SOLD

I'm starting to understand more the idea of limiting the value range, at least in the way that it affects the shadow area - leaving the shadow mass soft, still anchoring the object without having to put the darkest darks there. Instead, the darkest note is in the area with the most interest. I luckily got the right colors down real fast and this turned out to be only a little more than an hour long.

Banana #4

1/31. Banana #4, oil on linen panel, 4x6 in.

I was playing around in this one, leaving out some of the shadow details. Getting myself to see things a little differently.

Potato Cairn

Potato Cairn, oil on canvas panel, 10x8 in.

(Why have I not been capitalizing the words in my titles?...) This was a good exercise and I probably need to do something like it once in a while, but I was glad to finish it. I was up late painting it, which made it feel like it was taking much longer, but it turned out to be just under five hours including the previous night.

Potato cairn, WIP

Potato cairn stage 1 and 2, oil on canvas panel, 10x8 in.

I allowed myself less time to paint last night, so I'm breaking up this piece into two sessions. Not having a bigger linen panel ready, I used a RayMar canvas panel that was sitting around - with the surface sanded down a little and a quick drying layer of paint scraped smooth over the canvas texture (I scraped with a palette knife, leaving paint in the little depressions).

I wanted a simpler exercise in light and dark, and a setup with potatoes seemed right. And I realized the previous night that I tend to get too wet with medium early on, so focusing on the light I thought would also slow me down and keep things dry longer. I stacked the potatoes like this because the more I thought about them the more they felt like stones, and what can you do with stones (non-violently) that is more primeval than stacking them in unnatural ways?

Lemon and bowl

1/27. Lemon and bowl, oil on linen panel, 5x5 in. SOLD

I was confident in putting another element into the picture and wanted to keep it loose and quick but I really struggled here. At the start it seemed that this little Japanese dipping bowl would be the tricky thing, but it was the lemon that gave me the hardest time. I fudged with the color the whole time and with its "seat" in the bowl, just unable to make it feel like it wasn't weightless there. Maybe it was the second indirect light source throwing me off, or that I was starting to get hungry but forced myself to keep going, or it was a few too many bad songs and annoying commercials on the radio at the time. Eventually, though I lost the looseness I managed to unify some parts color-wise to get it at least in the right direction.