My Painting Process: Warm and Cool

I’ve had requests to explain a bit more about my painting process. It’s an edifying, albeit slow, process nailing down what I do and why. It doesn’t always make sense to me, even as I realise I’m doing it, but then evolution isn’t necessarily logical or sensible (think: furry creatures that eat very specific leaves only).

I admire artists who work strongly with warm and cool colour*. I know the theory. I’ve tried doing it slowly and conscientiously. I’ve drawn myself little diagrams of what part of a composition should be warm light and warm shadow, cool light and cool shadow, and still blown painting it thus. I put warm into cool areas, make distant hills darker than nearer, and choose between lemon yellow and cadmium yellow based on transparency not warmth.

I could blame all the “soft northern light” on Skye, but that doesn’t hold for not doing atmospheric perspective in a painting. And Monet said the light in Algeria taught him to see colour so all my years under a southern African sky should surely have imbued me too.

Most of the time I don’t about consciously think warm or cool, neither the lack thereof nor the using of it.

[cue: shock, horror]

I paint with my favourite colours**, and if something isn’t working when I’m in “pondering mode”, I consider changing the colour and/or the colour’s tone. But it’s not colour consciously measured in warm/cool. (That’s why if you’re in a workshop with me and you ask about something in warm/cool terms it takes me a while to respond, I need a bit of thinking time.)

Will it always be thus? I don’t know.

*Such as Alan McGowan in his figure painting and Michael Chelsea Johnson in his landscape paintings.

**Prussian blue, phthalo blue cyan, phthalo turquoise, cobalt blue, cerulean blue, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow light and medium, cadmium orange, magenta and titanium white.