Barbara J Carter

“Shadowed Hill”, 2008, acrylic on paper, 5×5″ matted to 14×11″

The sun was lowering in the sky. Fog had begun rolling in from the ocean, filling the valleys of Topanga State Park and introducing a slight haze to the air. Distant hills and ridges took on a misty, blue appearance, like something out of a fairy tale. This painting captures the almost abstract quality of the moment.

This painting is available matted $115, or framed as shown $145.

Email inquiries welcome: info@barbarajcarter.com

“Topanga Mist”, 2008, acrylic on paper, 5×5″ matted to 14×11″

While hiking in Topanga State Park last fall, I saw some amazing cloud formations. Fog from the ocean started rolling in from the coast. I’d hiked far enough uphill to see over the next ridge and down into the valley where the fog was pooling. The sun, behind this pool of fog, made it glow eerily. The haze also veiled the far ridge in a lavender mist.

Much taken with this spectacle, I snapped several photos. Now I’ve turned the experience into a mini painting (and probably will do more). The composition of this painting appears quite abstract, but it’s actually quite true to the photos I took. Just some of the colors are a little altered, to give it my own twist. With such a simple composition I was able to have a lot of fun with my Pointillist technique.

This painting is available matted $115, or matted and framed in a simple black frame $145.

Email inquiries welcome: info@barbarajcarter.com

A few months ago I mentioned that I was adding phthalocyanine blue (phthalo blue) back to my palette as an experiment. I think I can now report the results of the experiment.

When I was painting landscapes in New England, I struggled to use phthalo blue, but found it too bright and turquoise-y for my purposes. The colors I needed there were more red-toned, cooler blues. All I really needed for that was ultramarine blue. Phthalo blue eventually dropped off my palette entirely. I didn’t have a good use for it.

Then I moved to California. The light here is so different, as well as the terrain. Even the grasses and trees are different. I found myself in need of brighter tones to capture the brilliance of the light here, and so I reached for the phthalo blue. Recalling my earlier struggles with this wild color, I was unsure whether I’d be able to tame the beast this time. It was an experiment.

Now it’s been a few months since I started using phthalo blue again, and I’m pleased to report that it’s going much better this time!

Unfinished painting using phthalo blue in the sky and the hill shadows.

I find phthalo blue is just the thing for capturing the brassy light of California, with its bright skies and shimmering foliage. Phthalo blue mixes some VERY bright colors. This can be a problem if you want subtler tones, but it is terrific if you’re looking for brighter hues. Which I am! I am especially fond of using it in my skies, as well as in shadows. It also perks up tree foliage nicely.

The verdict? Phthalo blue is on my palette to stay!

I just stumbled across a wonderful video clip of the famous artist Wolf Kahn, speaking about landscape painting. You can find the clip here. (Be aware: it’s nearly an hour long.)

I greatly admire him. He paints with unabashedly bright colors, and his subject matter is the landscape, which he usually simplifies into color fields or semi-geometric forms. I enjoy his work, and I admire his success.

His speech was titled “Six Good Reasons Not to Paint a Landscape”. It’s a humorous piece, because of course he paints landscapes. But he does raise good points about the problems inherent in this genre. It’s a very old genre, and people tend to think “everything’s been done.” Given all its drawbacks, he said, “to be a landscape painter is to be a perverse individual.”

Hooray for perversity! Or at least, perseverance. I think this world needs more contrarians. How boring if we all did the same thing.

He also claimed to be a “color junkie.” I loved that. He said, “As I get older, the blue gets bluer and the yellow gets more yellow.” He uses bright colors, he goes on to say, because “I want excitement, I want intensity.”

That really resonates for me. I’m happiest when my paintings seem to vibrate with the intensity of the colors.

I’ve heard it said that young, less mature artists tend to use bright colors. As artists grow and mature (that is, get better) they use subtler, more neutral hues. A lot of grey in a painting is supposed to be the height of restraint and artistry.

Well, not for Wolf Kahn! At a nice mature age, he continues to revel in the childlike glee of vivid colors. By his own admission, his colors are getting even brighter as he gets older. And I say, good for him!

And I hope, good for me too. Because I’m a color junkie too.

I use titanium white as the white color on my palette. Its opacity is particularly suited to my “neo-pointillist” style.

“Glowing Hills” detail, 2007

I like how titanium white holds its own in mixtures with other colors. It lends opacity in mixes with transparent colors like ultramarine blue and alizarin crimson. A little white can tone down a saturated color. White can also make mixed colors a little cooler, which can be either good or bad depending on the effect you want. (One trick for keeping a color warm while still lightening the shade is to use some yellow along with the white.)

Anywhere you see what appears to be white in my paintings, it’s almost always a mixture of titanium white with a little bit of some other color. For example, those white-looking spots in the skies of my landscape paintings are typically titanium white mixed with a tiny dab of ultramarine blue.

Below is an older painting where I used white mixtures in several areas.

“Rough Pasture”, 2005

We’ve reached the final stop on the tour of my palette: White. It is possible to paint quite successfully without black (and I do), but white is indispensable.

There are two kinds of white paint available: zinc white and titanium white. The main difference between the two is opacity: titanium white is very opaque and zinc white is more transparent. Zinc white is sometimes called tinting white or blending white.

My “neo-pointillist” style requires opaque paint colors, so I use titanium white. My style is a layered technique and I only want the top layer to show. When I paint a dot that overlaps other dots, I don’t want the ones underneath to show through.

Oh, and that photo above? Well, that’s what my palette really looks like when I’m painting. Big blobs of colors all over the place. I figured you might enjoy a peek at the real thing, and anyway white paint doesn’t show up against a white background very well!

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!

“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.