Barbara J Carter

There’s one oddball color that I use on my palette: cadmium orange.

I call it “oddball” because I generally use a very limited palette of just a few primary colors plus white. I don’t even use black! (Not using black is another old trick of the Impressionists.) So why do I allow a lowly secondary color like orange onto the precious real estate of my palette?

I wish I could show you cadmium orange paint straight from the tube in person. (Well, I can if you come to one of my shows!) The photo just doesn’t do it justice. It is an amazingly saturated color. I can certainly make orange by mixing cadmium red and cadmium yellow, but it will be less saturated (duller). Granted, I don’t always want to use the brightest colors, but when I do want something really bright I like having cadmium orange to really pump up the volume.

It’s just too luscious not to use!

“November Sun 7″, 2007, 10×8″

I see two worlds of art, but I struggle to describe the difference between the two.

I hate using the word “decorative” to describe the kind of work that so many artists (including myself!) make, art meant to lift the spirit, to be enjoyed in someone’s home on a daily basis. Besides, what do you then call the other stuff? The work that challenges us? It’s not necessarily nice to look at, and not many people want it hanging over the dining table frowning down at them at every meal, but it’s important stuff nonetheless. It’s educational, mind-expanding, and yes, often very uncomfortable.

I’ve always had trouble knowing what to call these two types of art. Pretty and ugly? I’ll confess to using these tags as an internal shorthand, but they are far too simplistic, not to mention fundamentally inaccurate. After all, some work meant for the home isn’t necessarily pretty: it can be soothing, or contemplative, or just plain weird. And while lots of the challenging stuff is ugly, plenty isn’t. Anyway, “ugly” is subjective, not to mention unnecessarily pejorative. So what then? Hard vs easy? Academic vs commercial? Conceptual vs perceptual? None of these is right.

The other day a fellow artist wrote what I thought was a nice description of the two types of art. Here, with permission, I quote:

There are two kinds of art: “cathartic art” and “chi raising art”.

“Cathartic art” addresses the “story”, the political, social, environmental, etc. subject matters. Many purposes are served by cathartic art both for the artist that creates it and the viewing public. Cathartic art can be beautiful or ugly. Art schools and a lot of curators love cathartic art.

“Chi raising art” is beautiful art. It raises the energy of the space and the viewer and makes one feel good to be alive. The heart leaps when in the presence of a truly beautiful piece of art. Beautiful art tends to be vilified in art school as being trite and superficial when, in fact, it touches the soul and is the highest level of art because it shifts the vibrational frequency to a higher plane, away from fear and pain. The buying public, generally, loves chi raising art.

-Charlene Marsh

Now, I don’t personally buy into such notions as “chi” and “vibrational energy”. (It’s the hardnosed scientist in me.) But I still thought this was a very good summation of what, exactly, we artists are trying to do. And by “us” I do mean all of us, both the academics intent on making a statement, and those of us creating beauty to be enjoyed and lived with. There’s room for both kinds.

“Trees on a Hill”, 2007, 12×9″.

As I mentioned last time, right now I’m only using one yellow, cadmium yellow. I almost never use it straight from the tube. It’s very intense. Mixed with white it makes a very strong yellow that doesn’t “shout” too loudly. All of the yellows in the above painting are mixed with at least a little white. The paler shades, of course, have much more white in the mix.

Cadmium yellow mixed with cadmium red makes a strong but not overbearing orange. I will talk more about orange in another post.

Mixed with blue, cadmium yellow makes a good range of bright greens. Given that cadmium yellow is an orange-yellow rather than a green-yellow, greens mixed from it tend to be less saturated. Even so, I often dull them down further with a small bit of red. The above painting is an exception to this rule, in that I used some pretty bright shades of green. All were mixed from cadmium yellow and one or the other of my blues (mostly ultramarine). I always mix my greens, I don’t use any tube greens.

The other yellow, cadmium lemon, is so intense that I had dropped it from my palette a year or two ago. But I am considering reintroducing it, especially now that I’m in California and need to depict the brassy light here. I might find cadmium lemon’s brash exuberance useful.

Mixed with blue, cadmium lemon yellow makes greens that are so bright they appear fluorescent… or poisonous! But mixed with white, and maybe a tiny bit of something else, it can make some very delicate pale colors.

We’ll see how I feel about cadmium lemon yellow when I try using it again. I’m looking forward to the experiment. And of course I’ll report on the results!

I started out using two yellows on my palette: cadmium yellow and cadmium lemon. Recently I’ve only been using cadmium yellow, but I am considering returning cadmium lemon to my palette.

Cadmium Yellow

As I discussed in my post about my reds, cadmium colors are typically “warm”. In the case of cadmium yellow, that means it tends toward a slightly reddish tint, like goldenrod. I think of it as a “mellow” yellow, though it is pretty bright straight from the tube.

The particular cadmium yellow that I use is Golden Paints‘ Cadmium Yellow Medium. It’s the tube to the right in the photo above. You can see the warm golden tone of the paint, which contrasts nicely with the cooler lemony color of…

Cadmium Lemon Yellow

Even though this color is derived from cadmium as well, it is a much “cooler” yellow than “regular” cadmium yellow. The “lemon” designation means that it’s closer to chartreuse than amber. It is so intense, it looks like it’s glowing. As you can see in the photo above, the lemon yellow (on the left) looks almost fluorescent compared to the mellow golden color next to it.

The brand I use for cadmium lemon is Winsor & Newton, since Golden (my usual brand) doesn’t make a cad lemon. The one drawback to the Winsor & Newton brand is that I can only get it in small tubes.

Unfinished painting (detail) using both ultramarine and phthalo blue.

As I mentioned in my last post, I use two blue colors on my palette, ultramarine blue and phthalo blue.

A few years ago, when I first left science and began painting in a serious way, I chose to use two of each of the primary colors (two reds, two blues, and two yellows). This was based on my studies in color theory (I’ll post more about that someday).

But as I painted, I found myself using very little of the phthalo blue. It’s a difficult color. It’s so intense, it just takes over any mixture it’s in. Colors created with it tend to be really bright. At the end of each painting day, I would find myself scraping a nearly untouched pile of phthalo blue off my palette. So I started squeezing out less and less of the stuff, just to avoid wasting so much. Finally I realized that I was fighting the color, and deleted it from my palette. The majority of my New England paintings were painted with only a single blue: ultramarine.

Ultramarine is such a workhorse, it’s not surprising I got along fine with it as my only blue for so long. It “plays well with others.” It mixes with yellow to make some nice vivid greens (which I often toned down with a small dab of red). Ultramarine mixes with alizarin crimson to make the most sumptuous violets and purples you could ask for, other than straight from a tube. Mixed with white, I got the perfect shades for the New England sky, which is a mauve-blue. Who needs phthalo?

Then I moved to California. The light here is quite different from New England. It’s bright and brassy. Even shadows have a brighter tone. That’s the old impressionist trick of using blue in shadows from the sky’s reflected light. Here in California, even the shadows are brighter.

I decided to reintroduce phthalo blue to my palette. The red-toned ultramarine blue I’d limited myself to no longer seemed sufficient to capture the nuances of color I was seeing here.

I still have to be very careful how I use phthalo blue. It’s a love-hate relationship. On the one hand, it certainly expanded the range of colors I can mix. On the other, it still wants to take over. I think of the color as “shouting”. When it shouts too loudly, it drowns out the other colors. And my other colors aren’t exactly shy! So I’m back to using both blues, but it’s a challenge.

My palette evolves as my painting evolves. And that’s a good thing.