Color studies: Lucia Salemme — & Jan

Jan and I continue our explorations of color (Color Exercises for the Painter by Lucias Salemme), and, glory be, we have reached Exercise 4. Exercise 4 calls for a painting rather than samples (see the photo above) of what you can do with various pigments. Because Jan (daughter) and I figure this is a good 5 year project and excellent for mother-daughter bonding as well as gathering of gossip, we make slow progress — we work only on Sundays when both of us are available and we don’t try to do too much in any one session.

So Sunday the 28th of June, we got to paint a landscape in “earth” colors. One of Salemme’s charms is that the book was published in 1970 (smells sort of musty) and uses concepts and language current during that period. My more hip artist friends have been a trifle critical of its drawbacks, but I, being ancient, see them as historical artifacts which might actually contain bits of truth.

At any rate, in Exercise 4, we were to use the “earth colors” and make an actual landscape: the paints “allowed” are raw umber, burnt umber, raw sienna, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, Indian Red, and terre verte (which Salemme call “green earth”, which I couldn’t find anywhere and am assuming that for artistes, the French has come to serve the same purpose).

Here’s Jan, excited about the prospect of painting and practicing her measuring skills. Or something:

Note that there’s nothing on the boards on her easel. She’s holding the instructions, which tend to be the opposite of Betty Edwards, our last artist companion. Edwards spelled everything out in such detail that we were left gasping; Salemme is pretty cavalier about what to do. “Paint a landscape. Use a rag to wipe out the light spots. Don’t use anything but earth colors until you near the end of the process.” OK, we can do that.

I disliked my painting, and so won’t make it visible, but Jan, who worked from the cover of a book about painting landscapes by John Carlson, did beautifully. You didn’t know that genes worked backwards through the family structure, did you?

Already her sense of color seems to exceed mine. I’m going out today and copy what she did — but hush, don’t tell her. After all, I am her mother and supposed to be the expert in all things. I wouldn’t want her to know otherwise. –June

By the way, Comcast shut down totally last night and is incredibly slow this AM, so my daily post, which normally is set to appear at 5 AM Pacific time, is now going to upload now, at 9:30. Or so I hope.

Tags: oil painting