Day Eighty Eight: The Golden Hour by Charles Warren Eaton
Hello and welcome to Day 88 of 100 days of Tonalism.
Today's study is 'The Golden Hour' by Charles Warren Eaton.
I seem to have exhausted most of my sources of biographical information for Charles Warren Eaton. It's too bad that I haven't received the book by David A Cleveland I just ordered. I'm really excited to be getting this book as it is out of print, it is an exhaustive study of Eaton's body of work and history, I'm very much looking forward to reading it. Today's video features a track from my album, The Lost Horizon, so please check it out.
Over the last several weeks we've been talking about my history as an artist and my progression to becoming a landscape painter and then a Tonalist landscape painter. As promised in yesterday's post, today I'm going to talk a bit about the evolution of my understanding of color, especially as it pertains to Tonalism.
My first exposure to working with color was at the job that I held at a picture frame manufacturing company that provided custom art and framing to the hospitality industry. This was back in the 80's and 90's. Very often hotels would provide us with swatches of their carpets and drapes and other fixtures. The reason for this was so that we could do our best to match these colors with map board and in the case of moldings we would do custom stains and finishes. This, at times, could be an exceedingly difficult task because the colors had to match very closely and the boss that I worked for was a perfectionist. Ultimately though, it was good experience and good exposure to mixing and matching colors. Experience that I use everyday in my own work.
When I first started doing landscape painting I would do my best to match the colors in my photographic reference using my limited palette of pigments. If something in my photographic reference was bright, I would paint it bright and when something was muted I would paint it that way. I have a good color sense and so my paintings were always balanced, but I was not as focused in the early stages of my painting career as I am today on using color to evoke an emotive response.
This is something that Tonalism excels at, I can think of no other school of painting that uses color so powerfully to evoke emotions in the viewer. This is one of the major divergences that it made from Impressionism. Whereas Impressionism is focused on duplicating certain light effects that are found in nature using primary and secondary colors, Tonalism is more concerned with achieving tonal harmony and vibrance through manipulation of color.
In my initial attempts at Tonalist painting, I would start off by limiting the amount of highlights in my work so that whole painting moved into a lower key, as if the painting had been exposed to smoke. Sometimes I would do this with glazing, but mostly I just kept myself from pushing my highlights too far. As I continued to practice this mode of painting, it became apparent to me that stronger value contrasts would make my work more effective.
I experimented with adding a certain amount of the same color to each of my mixtures, this is a technique that quite a few Tonalist painters would use, primarily Whistler. For example, I might mix a little bit of burnt sienna into all of my green colors and allow it to peek through the blues of the sky or the grays, this would give everything a tonal vibration of sienna. You could do this with any color though. I soon abandoned this approach, it was unsatisfactory as it was too contrived.
These days I achieve tonal harmony in my work because I know my palette intimately and I know how to run my colors. It's very much a state of mind in my case, and though I follow some of the techniques I listed above, Mostly I just mix my colors intuitively and get harmony that way. I believe it also helps to work on a gray pallet. My palette is made out of metal and is quite neutral.
Another way that I achieve tonal harmony in my work is through the use of glazing, either by glazing with earth yellow or black, this has a way of subduing more intense colors although I will go into the light areas and generally paint them a few shades lighter and brighter after I've done my glazing.
Tomorrow will talk about values and contrasts so stay tuned for that.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about 'The Golden Hour' by Charles Warren Eaton; this is another one of Eaton's later, more simplified paintings. It is very tonal in approach and the predominant tone would be yellow. I enjoyed painting this and I got some nice textual effects in my study, especially in the sky.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| Painted after - The Golden Hour by Charles Warren Eaton, Study by M Francis McCarthy - Size 5x7, Oil on wood panel |
I seem to have exhausted most of my sources of biographical information for Charles Warren Eaton. It's too bad that I haven't received the book by David A Cleveland I just ordered. I'm really excited to be getting this book as it is out of print, it is an exhaustive study of Eaton's body of work and history, I'm very much looking forward to reading it. Today's video features a track from my album, The Lost Horizon, so please check it out.
Over the last several weeks we've been talking about my history as an artist and my progression to becoming a landscape painter and then a Tonalist landscape painter. As promised in yesterday's post, today I'm going to talk a bit about the evolution of my understanding of color, especially as it pertains to Tonalism.
My first exposure to working with color was at the job that I held at a picture frame manufacturing company that provided custom art and framing to the hospitality industry. This was back in the 80's and 90's. Very often hotels would provide us with swatches of their carpets and drapes and other fixtures. The reason for this was so that we could do our best to match these colors with map board and in the case of moldings we would do custom stains and finishes. This, at times, could be an exceedingly difficult task because the colors had to match very closely and the boss that I worked for was a perfectionist. Ultimately though, it was good experience and good exposure to mixing and matching colors. Experience that I use everyday in my own work.
When I first started doing landscape painting I would do my best to match the colors in my photographic reference using my limited palette of pigments. If something in my photographic reference was bright, I would paint it bright and when something was muted I would paint it that way. I have a good color sense and so my paintings were always balanced, but I was not as focused in the early stages of my painting career as I am today on using color to evoke an emotive response.
This is something that Tonalism excels at, I can think of no other school of painting that uses color so powerfully to evoke emotions in the viewer. This is one of the major divergences that it made from Impressionism. Whereas Impressionism is focused on duplicating certain light effects that are found in nature using primary and secondary colors, Tonalism is more concerned with achieving tonal harmony and vibrance through manipulation of color.
In my initial attempts at Tonalist painting, I would start off by limiting the amount of highlights in my work so that whole painting moved into a lower key, as if the painting had been exposed to smoke. Sometimes I would do this with glazing, but mostly I just kept myself from pushing my highlights too far. As I continued to practice this mode of painting, it became apparent to me that stronger value contrasts would make my work more effective.
I experimented with adding a certain amount of the same color to each of my mixtures, this is a technique that quite a few Tonalist painters would use, primarily Whistler. For example, I might mix a little bit of burnt sienna into all of my green colors and allow it to peek through the blues of the sky or the grays, this would give everything a tonal vibration of sienna. You could do this with any color though. I soon abandoned this approach, it was unsatisfactory as it was too contrived.
These days I achieve tonal harmony in my work because I know my palette intimately and I know how to run my colors. It's very much a state of mind in my case, and though I follow some of the techniques I listed above, Mostly I just mix my colors intuitively and get harmony that way. I believe it also helps to work on a gray pallet. My palette is made out of metal and is quite neutral.
Another way that I achieve tonal harmony in my work is through the use of glazing, either by glazing with earth yellow or black, this has a way of subduing more intense colors although I will go into the light areas and generally paint them a few shades lighter and brighter after I've done my glazing.
Tomorrow will talk about values and contrasts so stay tuned for that.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about 'The Golden Hour' by Charles Warren Eaton; this is another one of Eaton's later, more simplified paintings. It is very tonal in approach and the predominant tone would be yellow. I enjoyed painting this and I got some nice textual effects in my study, especially in the sky.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| Original painting, The Golden Hour by Charles Warren Eaton |