Painting with Paul Cézanne
“We live in a rainbow of chaos” Paul Cézanne
Cézanne was a major force paralleling mainstream Impressionism. Always somewhat apart, he innovated and brought fresh ways of seeing to us all: both Matisse and Picasso are said to have remarked that Cézanne “is the father of us all.”. Cézanne sought to sense something fundamental about all subjects and through his investigations of still life, figures and landscapes, gave life to modernism and changed the world of art forever. I still scratch my head somewhat when I look at a Cézanne. Normally there are some other significant painters with something of the same style. But not Cézanne, he just saw things differently and now, so do we.
Then there is his description of his painting process…a description that rings as true to my heart as any :
“If I reach too high or too low, everything is a mess. There must not be a single loose strand, a single gap through which the tension, the light, the truth can escape. I have all parts of my canvas under control simultaneously. If things are tending to diverge, I use my instincts and my beliefs to bring them back together again….I take the tones of colour I see to my right and my left, here, there everywhere and I fix these gradations. I bring them together…. They form lines, and become objects, rocks, trees, without my thinking about it. They acquire volume, they have an effect. When these masses and weights on my canvas correspond to the planes, and spots which I see in my mind and which we see with our eyes, then the canvas closes it’s fingers.”
Reinforcing Lights and Darks
An often neglected “stage” in a painting is restating lights and darks. Paintings often start well, particularly when they are following a value study: clear, maybe even monochrome darks contrast with lights. Forms are blocked and connected, colour and context added. Details and adjustments made. Then suddenly, it’s gone all muddy! Or perhaps it nearly almost works but looks lifeless. What once looked really dark, or light, looks less so now, essentially because there is so much more going on. It’s about contrast or relative value. It doesn’t matter a whit how dark or light something is, if it blends into the surrounding area.
The solution is of course, quite simple: make the darkest dark even darker and the lights lighter. This is often termed “restating”. Two things are going on here: when initially applied, what looks very dark is often not as dark as you think…because of the stark surrounding – and now the opposite is true, given it’s been surrounded by mid-tone paint.
I’m sometimes asked what’s more important, the lights or the darks? Well, I think TV’s Bob Ross got it right when he said: “you have to have the dark in order to show the light.” A dab of pure dark here and there, I’d say a cool blue-black.
Achieving Darks and Lights on a developed Watercolour
Adding dark is fairly straightforward – work to keep the pigment potent by half drying your brush as you collect pigment. Achieving (lost) lights in watercolour is a little trickier, however something can always be done! I generally start by lifting pigment with a small stiff brush, some water and dabbing with paper towel. A little opaque white works well too, although the white will not look quite the same as the white of the paper. My final tool is a small, sharp knife or razor – dragging it sideways to scrape the surface.
Painting demonstration in Watercolour
Time for one last water colour demonstration. This time a landscape, loosely based on a view in the Gatineau’s
I often start by getting the overall spatial arrangements in dry media: pencil, charcoal, sometimes ink and then model mid-tone washes and darks with a limited palette (in this case Cerulean blue, Ultramarine blue and Hansa yellow). Depending on subject, I might use a single blue, yellow and a brown (however rarely a full red). For landscapes, yellow and blue make my greens and sometimes I use only a brown and a blue and then paint green onto already established blue-darks.
Notice that I leave quite a bit of white space. That’s because I’m defining my shadow areas with the initial washes and I want to leave myself plenty of bare paper for some chromatic washes later on.
At this stage, I use exclusively non-staining colours to enable some local removal (lifting) of pigment: you can test for this by applying brush and water to some dry swaths of pigment. Here are the non-staining pigments on my palette right now: Cadmium Red, Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Blue, Cerulean Blue, Cadmium Yellow, Yellow Ochre and Hansa Yellow (lightly staining).
The staining pigments I avoid at this stage are: Alizarin Crimson, all purples, Pthalo blue (like the plague), and Lemon Yellow. I don’t use green, however many are staining: pthalo being an often-used constituent.
Developing the painting
In the video I started in a limited palette, using non-staining pigments. Painting now flows following my creative inclinations: taking advantage of opportunities I see in the work, keeping colour and some added definition in mind.
In this case, I started by lifting out some more colour from the green line at the left. I also decided that I wanted a fair expanse of field leading to the barn/farm. The problem was I had prematurely drawn a line in ink to limit my picture space. So I erased it! My paper is not the best quality to say the least, however with some water and a very stiff brush I was able to get most of the water-fast ink out. This process is more akin to scraping than lifting – I am definitely destroying the paper surface. Believe it or not, this damage rarely shows…however don’t try too much wet-on-wet on the damaged area!
Next, I added in a line of distant hills on the left. Intending to use purple in the sky, I took the opportunity to block the hills in with purple so that they would fade into the background. I’m following the idea of painting in three zones (as in week 2) and these hills form part of the background, along with the sky. The other lines of hills, plus building, form the mid-ground. The lead-in pasture is my foreground.
At this stage, I added some light green to one field to add interest and some warm colour to the roof of the building – I started with yellow adding some orange as well, being careful to keep it in the light zone.
Then I added some depth to the sky with purple and ultramarine. I wanted it dark and purple-y at the horizon because my roof is lighter and orangey/yellow! The distant hills now fade into the background – a little more than I intended, however, I like the result.
Next I added some gestural greens, yellows and browns to my field using Yellow Ochre. After some wiping, I was happy…I like abstracted foreground lead-ins.
Finally, I added some detail to the building with a grey wash plus ink, then created a little fence or enclosure. I also added Phthalo green to the abstracted tree/bush on the right (so that it separates from other greens).
Not at all high realism eh? – however lots of fun and I like the result!
Care and Framing
So we come to the end of the course and I thought it useful to include some information on looking after your watercolours. There are of course many good references on the internet and these three made good sense to me:
https://www.paintingwithwatercolors.com/how-to-frame-a-watercolor-painting/
Exercises
- Review some of your recent drawings and watercolours and look for opportunities to reinforce lights and darks.
- This week, choose a new reference or perhaps get a start to the season with some plein-air painting. Draw and paint in the style of your choice. Whether it’s realistic or abstract, wet-on-wet or entirely dry media I look forward to seeing the results.