So over Thanksgiving I was in Baltimore.

My son and I got to stay with my daughter and see how she has carved out her life there.  How she decorates her townhouse, what life is like in the Harbor (one word-cold) and where she works at Johns Hopkins,

One day I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth and I noticed a light bulb had burned out above the sink. And the thing that fascinated me was the fact that the 2 remaining light bulbs were different from each other. One warm. One cool.

Now if you know anything about me or my work you know that light is my jam. I teach about it, am devoted to understanding it and applying the physics of light to my work and I genuinely worry about artists that paint beautiful pantings but have huge holes in their work due to not understanding the Law and Rules of light. It literally hurts my heart. And sometimes when I see paintings where artists don’t understand light, it feels like visual nails on a chalkboard.

So back to the bathroom. Light controls everything we see and everything  is affected by its dominant color. So the green walls in the bathroom here appear yellow-green on the left and blue- green on the right.  This patch of wall now looks to be be 2 separate hues on the color wheel depending on which light source is casting across it. This is what makes it hard to find the perfect paint color when painting walls. Light will skew it, change it, tone it or completely change the hue. (this why I’ve helped many friends and neighbors with color chips for painting rooms in their houses)

So it begs the question- Which “green” on the wall is the “correct” color? What color is it really? The entire wall was painted with the same exact gallon of paint. But depending on the light source- the dominance of the color of the light– the wall will appear to change radically. So here is my cheeky answer – it doesn’t matter. Only our perception. Color is malleable. Color changes. Color is complex. And to render anything in paint with a sense of believability and realism you must think of the light source and the color of it. Photos will lie to you so be sure to find out the source dominance and then stick to it in your paintings. In my recent commissions the little girls are wearing yellowish, cream-colored dresses, yet they are out in natural, blue-ish light. The light is blue and cool. The dresses now have to conform. It does not matter what color the dresses are. Light dominates. As the dresses and their faces “go to the light” and get drenched in more and more light the color of their faces and the dresses have to go….blue.  This was a hard thing to hold in the paintings because the photos just showed the dresses getting “lighter” and washed out and either bleached out to pure white or just still a lighter yellow. Can not happen. (Notice how in the photo above both light bulbs appear to be pure white. Wrong.) Just like the bathroom greens, the color will rotate to take on the color of the light. Because light is in charge. I had better listen.

Here is a snippet of a dress “going to the light.”  The mixture I used to paint the lightest folds was mixed up with Ivory black and Titanium white paint only.  Yeah- black is actually a blue and cool pigment and so is white. So the dresses went to blue in the light which meant I had to use black and white paint in the lightest areas to make the dresses cooler. (remember, grey is not a color) Everything that got very lit went blue- even their blonde hair. I also did this on the faces for the most lit highlights because highlights are nothing more than pure light beams so they had better be painted  the dominant color of the light source- which is blue. I found dragging very pale blue paint across a very warm and pinkish skin tone very fun. Feels very rich. And the shadows have to stay relatively warm. Rule of light #3- Temperatures of color have to be the opposite in lit vs. non-lit areas. 

So I hope this helps in your quest to paint. Because everything in the end is only seen because of light. She needs to be respected.

Next week-  the commissions.