(2) Origins of My Mental and Social Deviance

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Learning to paint once seemed to be a reputable enough aspiration.  At the time that I embarked on this course, I also happened to be impoverished (a condition that perhaps contributed to the belief that I might have the credentials to be an artist).  Not wanting to waste money that didn't exist, I bought only the minimum number of pigments that I thought I would need.  

In addition to black and white, I bought red, blue, and yellow.  I was thinking primaries.  I was thinking of the modernist classic paintings of Mondrian.  I was thinking of Mrs. Finkey's high school art class, where I'd been told that from these basics, I could mix any color in the world.

My first official activity in the role of artist was to squeeze out a bit of blue from the tube, followed by a bit of red.  I gooshed them carefully together with the palette knife, wondering what lustrous shade of purple would result.

What I actually created was a color that resembled charred sludge.

I had to ask a number of questions of more experienced painters, then rummage around the art supply store awhile, before I recalled a pinkish-purplish shade of red that I'd seen on a color plate during some vaguely educational trip to a printing plant.

I found that this "magenta" pigment worked equally well whether I mixed it with blue to produce purple, or with yellow to make orange.  Concluding that the reason printers used it was that it worked, I privately dubbed the color "true visual red."

As I began to be able to mix specific colors from their components, my next hurdle was to overcome my lack of a useful overall color theory.  In Mrs. Finkey's art class, I had been taught about color complements and so forth.  These lessons might be useful if the colors I wanted to use were bright blue and bright orange, or bright red and bright green.  But with any of the more subtle colors of the real world, the theory just went kaput.

One of the biggest gaps in the theory I'd been taught was that it didn't have much of anything to say about brown.  Given the ubiquity of brown on this planet--in the coloration of most animals, from tadpoles to man, as well as in plant matter and in the earth itself--it seemed to be a color that we ought to understand fairly thoroughly.   But my high school art class (like, I suspect, most people's) had treated brown as just son of a non-color...a bottom-of-the-Disposall hue...at best, a sort of visual cautionary tale on the effects of mixing too many other pigments together.

I was eventually able to find a more reasonable approach to brown in color charts for commercial house paint.  These charts, with their complete, detailed mixing instructions, made it plain that brown is simply dark yellow (or dark orange, or something in between the two).

© COPYRIGHT 1993 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.