Harold Speed Discusses Color and Taste

Welcome to the GJ Book Club. Today we'll cover pages 192-216 of the chapter on "Tone and Colour Design," from Harold Speed's 1924 art instruction book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials.

I'll present Speed's main points in boldface type either verbatim or paraphrased, followed by my comments. If you want to add a comment, please use the numbered points to refer to the relevant section of the chapter.

Veronese—Allegory of Love: Infidelity

1. Veronese analysis

Speed does a diagrammatic analysis of the painting, and notes the large arc formed by the woman's arms and shoulders.

2. Warm and Cool Color

Speed groups the following as cool colors: lemon yellow, green, greenish blue and full blue.

Warm colors include orange yellow, orange, orange red and full red. Purple is on the dividing line.

3. If the colors are very vivid and violent they will tend to make their complementary colors tell in the picture.

Harmony and contrast are not always in agreement. More of one quality makes for less of the other.

4. When the color introduced is of a quieter order, those similar to it in the other parts of the picture sing up in sympathy.

For example, a blue note will bring out all the cool colors.

Seago --Thames Embankment

5. The picture that has a prevailing unity of hue, but is full of color varieties subtly introduced in the tones is one of the most beautiful of schemes.

With all the coal smoke in Speed's day, London subjects were often gray days, mostly monochromatic schemes with subtle color—He advises not to overdo it trying to make a pretty picture. Important to get the sober feeling. The prevailing hue must never be of a very pronounced color, but always in the more neutral range.

6. The selection of too many varieties of colour masses should be avoided....A lavish display is apt to be vulgar. 

Giampietrino Last Supper ca. 1520 after Leonardo

7. Copy of Leonardo's Last Supper. Strong color notes of red and blue brought together in the figure of Christ. 

8. Arrange masses of color so that warm colors are grouped together and cold colors together.
Kind of like shape welding using color temperature instead of value. 

9. "Whenever any composition device becomes too obvious, one's sympathy is alienated."

Speed cautions against making the contrasts too violent, and leaves that for the poster designer.

10. Begin planning your color scheme with the broad idea and let the varieties be added to this large intention.

11. White masses always need very careful designing, as they catch the eye. 

Harold Speed -- The Alcantara, Toledo

12. Toledo bridge. Painted in monochrome, allowed to dry, with color added later. 

Sargent Wyndham sisters.

13. Grouping multiple white masses into a larger mass.

White needs careful observing. Beware of harsh chalky whites.

14. When painting outdoors, it's easier to get the overall color impression, but when painting from imagination, it's harder to invent a convincing color statement.

Beware of using blue too much as a unifier.

15. Good exercise: Start with a black and white reproduction and invent various color schemes consistent with those tonal values.

16. Two sources of inspiration: the study of nature and the study of the best art of all times.

These are also the keys to freeing oneself from the fashion of the moment, says Speed.

17. Page 211. "What a better world we might have if real experts were allowed to control the formation of our habits, and were consulted by those in authority when anything demanding taste came up for discussion."

Speed goes on a rant here. He argues that ordinary people end up preferring art of lower standards merely from habit, because they're not exposed to finer things. His appeal for a cultural elite must have seemed like a reasonable bastion against the artistic excesses of his time, but I don't think such a top-down program would work in free countries, particularly given the penchant for artists to defy authority. 

Today the aesthetic standards are largely defined by commerce. In the USA art lives or dies in the marketplace, with art that sells for higher prices or movies that make big box office results being justified on those terms.

However, the Internet has fostered the growth of a citizen band of book critics, movie commentators, and teachers of form and style. And the Internet has also introduced crowd-sourcing as a new model of funding and distribution. This crowd-sourced check-valve on the arts has changed how and why creators do what they do. I wonder what Speed would have thought of it.

18. Art takes patience to appreciate. 
Speed says, "The mind only opens to the reception of ideas and experiences that are beyond one's present capacity." He says that art takes patience and reverence to really appreciate. He tells the story of the young museum-goer asking him to explain the merits of an old master to him. Speed advocates spending time with older painters and "getting past the brown varnish" to understand its retiring qualities.

19. Beware the "one better" type.

He might be referring to Cubists and Fauvists, and he makes specific reference to poster designers, all artists in his opinion who strive for effect by making extreme statements. Speed is always a voice for restraint, reserve, and balance.


Next week—We'll continue with Materials on page 217.

-----

In its original edition, the book is called "The Science and Practice of Oil Painting." Unfortunately it's not available in a free edition, but there's an inexpensive print edition that Dover publishes under a different title "Oil Painting Techniques and Materials (with a Sargent cover)," and there's also a Kindle edition.

----
GurneyJourney YouTube channel
My Public Facebook page
GurneyJourney on Pinterest
JamesGurneyArt on Instagram
@GurneyJourney on Twitter

Wild Boar

I sketched this wild boar in a restaurant in Guadalupe, Spain while waiting for lunch.
----
Previously: Wild boar paintings by Georges-Frédéric Rötig

Monkey in Snowsuit and his Animal Friends

Fedor the monkey heads out in his snowsuit to check on his friends, the chicken and the goat. Link to YouTube Via BoingBoing

Water Reflections vs. Ice Reflections

In water refections, the reflected image mirrors the subject at a slightly darker value, deepening the colors of whatever it's reflecting. 

Even in still water, distortions begin changing the reflected image. Verticals remain legible, but they're typically blurred in the vertical direction. Thin horizontal lines disappear.

Tiny ripples introduce wobble into the image, but the components of the image—in this case branches, tree trunks, and sky—are still  legible as separate elements.

How is this different with reflections on ice?

Here are three different photographs taken of a pond at the same time of morning on different sunny days. 

• In #1, the open water is a little more disturbed than in the previous picture, so the ripple distortions are greater. 

• In #2, a thin layer of smooth ice has formed. The range of values of the reflection is less than with the water surface. Where the ice refroze and formed a thicker edge in the middle, it reflects more deep blue color from the sky. 

• In #3, the ice has aged several days, roughening the surface and making it less reflective. The value range is even narrower.

Below are three photos of ice reflections on overcast days. In all three, the overcast conditions reduce the contrast of warm and cool colors, and they all appear more gray.

• #1 is ice with a thin layer of water on top of it. The ice raises the values of the deepest darks, but the water offers a clear reflection of the trees.

• In #2, ice at the edges vs. open water in the middle of the pond shows the difference between the two.

• #3. Older ice reflects the trees as soft dark verticals against a light sky all the way to the far shore. 

The bottom line: Ice reflections are less definite than water reflections. They are blurrier, and they should be painted with a narrower range of values. If you're not bold enough with water reflections, they tend to look like ice reflections.

-----

My book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter discusses reflections, atmospheric effects, and a lot more. You can get it from Amazon or at my website. 

Previous series: 

Water Reflections, Part 1

Water Reflections, Part 2

Water Reflections, Part 3

Using Computers to Create a Typical Rembrandt

A team of scientists and art historians announced today how they used statistical analysis, deep learning algorithms, and 3D printers to create an image that is intended to look like a typical Rembrandt. 


Here's how they did it (Link to YouTube)

Read about the process in The Guardian
Follow me on Instagram 
Thanks, Dan

DVD Review by Cynthia Sheppard

Cynthia Sheppard, Illustrator and Art Director for Magic: The Gathering says:

"James Gurney’s new DVD, "Fantasy in the Wild” is an enchanting reminder that there is fantastical inspiration all around us. Gurney takes us on a journey through the creation of two conceptual illustrations completed in a novel way—outside of his studio in various locations around town.

The DVD covers an array of pointers on gathering reference from places you might not think to look, as well as materials and tools for working on site. Ever wonder if a traffic cone could be an art supply staple? You should watch and find out....

He transforms the mundane into the fantastical, and delivers useful information with all the warmth and depth you expect from a Gurney production. It feels very much like you’re spending a weekend painting alongside Gurney, as he de-mystifies his process of illustrating using casein and discusses a few of his more unconventional approaches to interpreting everyday objects into creative concepts.

For me, watching the video was like hearing the voice of a caring artist friend who urges me to get off my butt and leave the studio for a fresh perspective. There was a sense of 'look how much fun this is!' running through the whole production, and I expect others who watch it will want to try out the plein-air concept art approach too.”

—Cynthia Sheppard, Illustrator and Art Director for Magic: The Gathering. Follow her on Twitter

----

"Fantasy in the Wild: Painting Concept Art on Location" is available as a download from Gumroad, or as a DVD direct from the manufacturer, or from Amazon.

In a Noodle Shop

Before you scroll down any farther, what does the style of this sketch remind you of? Can you think of any other art genre that the shapes and colors evoke?

About the sketch itself, this guy was looking out the window of a noodle shop, and I had about five minutes to paint him. 

To get the soft edge around his "love handle" area, I painted the gouache wet into wet. The white edge lighting is made up mostly of the white of the paper. I used Venetian red for the background color because the walls were painted that color.

Out of curiosity, I put my sketch into Google's "visually similar" image search, and I was surprised by the results. 

What it served up was a whole bunch of World War II posters from several countries, including the USA, Nazi Germany, Communist China, and Soviet Russia. There's also a Saturday Evening Post cover and a Western movie poster thrown in.  

These results are narrowly focused on a particular period of illustration with a particular purpose, that of arousing the energy of the people to work and fight.

What does that tell us about the style of my sketch? Did any of you think of propaganda art from the 1940s? Poster art from WW II is not a big study of mine, and certainly wasn't in my conscious mind when I was doing the sketch. 

I also wonder what this tells us about the visual intelligence behind Google's image search algorithm? It seems to be based purely on abstract colors and shapes, and it pays no heed to subject matter, other than the fact that it was a figure in a setting.

-----

You can try putting your own art into Google's "visually similar" image search and see what you come up with. 

"Gouache in the Wild" tutorial from Gumroad 

DVD of "Gouache in the Wild" on Amazon

Night Sketch

Provincetown, Massachusetts by streetlight

Micro Videos

Since joining Instagram, I've been having fun making micro-videos. (link to YouTube).

I went through some of my video files and found some stray clips that weren't long enough to make into full-blown YouTube videos. Because they're so short, I upload them to YouTube as unlisted videos. That way they can be embedded here on the blog, but they don't get announced to my YouTube subscribers. I also upload the micro videos to Facebook and Twitter, where I assume they reach a mostly non-overlapping audience.

Until recently, Instagram wouldn't let you upload a video longer than 15 seconds. I have enjoyed that strict limitation. It forces me to set a mood or to tell a story quickly. When it plays on Instagram, it cycles around several times. The effect is hypnotic and immersive, like being dropped for a moment into someone's else's shoes.

Instagram has just now lengthened its video limit to one minute, which gives a lot more scope for storytelling.
---
My Instagram feed has mostly different material from the blog.
-----
Previous Posts:
Painting Landscapes in Iowa on Amtrak
Painting Tiny Landscapes from the TGV
Sketching on Moving Trains in Europe

Chicken DNA Enhanced to Create New Dino Species

Control chicken embryo, altered chicken embryo and alligator embryo

Scientists at Yale University in New Haven succeeded last year in combining the DNA of a chicken and an alligator to create what some have called a "dino-chicken."

The experiment by Bhart-Anjan Abzhanov involved repressing the beak-development genes to allow more primitive features, left over from their Mesozoic ancestors, to emerge.


According to BBC, in their newest experiment, Abzhanov and his colleagues have added to that genetic blueprint the DNA information recovered from a well preserved Oviraptor fossil collected in the Liaoning province of China.

Unlike the killer "raptors" of the Jurassic Park franchise, these new animals exhibit what Abzhanov describes as "an unmistakable sense of humor, and an apparent desire to communicate using a suite of facial expressions and language-like calls."

Surprisingly, the animals exhibit a significantly larger cognitive capacity than the researchers expected. Three of them has taken up residency in Yale's Artificial Intelligence lab, where they have learned to operate computers and have used them to further alter the structure of their own DNA.

Yale has filed for a patent for the new animal, which they have dubbed Galloraptor ludificus. They announced yesterday that they plan to introduce Galloraptors into the marketplace as companion animals for the elderly.

The study is published in the journal Evolution
-----
Related Posts:
Copro Lights
Dinotopia-themed caskets
The New Mac iBox
White House Partners with Disney