Blog

     In this month blog I'm going to try to shed some light on what is for many people the most confusing aspect of color, and illustrate the way I approach it in my work. Chroma refers to intensity of color and is often called 'saturation' in photo editing programs. Basically it's the opposite of neutral. While there is some correlation of chroma to value, that isn't always necessarily the case. Yellow is at its most chromatic in the lightest values, reds are the most chromatic in the middle values, whereas deep blue and purple will be at their most chromatic within the darker range of the value scale. Pigments will come out of the tube at their strongest chroma, but deep transparent colors will require the addition of a small amount of white, or the white of the canvas showing through to reveal their full intensity.

     Working with still life gives me plenty of opportunities to go wild with color and I don't hesitate to use the full range of what's available on my palette if the situation calls for it. At the same time, I will rarely choose chroma over form or depth. Looking for and noting the subtle differences in color intensity can require the same kind of focus and concentration that is necessary to observe values or shapes well, but the results can enhance the feeling of form and show off the color to it's best advantage. Another way to put it is that when it comes to chroma, more isn't always more. To illustrate what I'm talking about I'll bring up a close up of the flow blue bowl in the painting above.

Just like almost everyone else, when I'm confronted with the challenge of painting an object like this with a vivid blue glaze, I have to fight the part of my brain that wants to dive head first into the ultramarine blue and spread it all over the place. The problem with that approach is that I'm not putting a blue glaze on a bowl, but instead I'm trying to create the illusion of light and shadow on an object in a painting. In the red circle you can see the spot directly under the highlight on the front rim where I determined the blue was the most chromatic. This plane closest to the light source was indicated using almost pure Ultramarine Blue with a touch of purple and a small amount of white.  Now that I have described this note in the most chromatic way my paints are capable of, I carefully relate every other note against that one -- keeping in mind that the only direction I can go is toward more neutral. Comparing the first blue note in the red circle to the color in the turquoise circle, you can see that in order to achieve the look of form turning toward shadow , the note of the blue glaze is now, by comparison, quite neutral. Another thing to pay attention to is the quality of the edges in this area. In order to get the look of blue rim in shadow up against light hitting the inside of the porcelain there is a dramatic value contrast. That's another reason I didn't want to overplay the chroma on the shadow side. If I had painted this edge first, and spread pure ultramarine up against the white it would have been pretty much impossible to avoid distracting blue halos along that edge as I tried to work the contrasting value notes into one another. 

     When handled in an effective way, spots of pure chroma can be like little jewels, helping give the illusion of strong color. Carefully relating the chroma can preserve the ability to describe light and form while keeping the viewer's attention on the more important areas of the painting. The key to making chroma work in this way is patient observation and comparison ---trusting what your eye sees and putting that down--- while also understanding and respecting what your pigments are capable of.