A highly transparent yellow that is warm but pale. Wonderful for giving colors a tea-like warmth. Makes beautiful greens, especially when mixed with Rembrandt Turquoise.

Cadmium Yellow is the left most of my prismatic colors⁴. The cadmium colors were introduced to artists around the mid-1800's and the innovations of the impressionists are often attributed to their development, for the cadmium colors opened a range of relative color which allowed for the expression of endless varieties of lighting conditions. Unlike many schools of painting, I have studied color with the belief that a student of color should initially use mainly the crude but powerful prismatic colors. One should paint first like a fauve, like a "wild beast". It is the most effective way to move through ones initial primitive awareness of color relationships⁵. Cadmium Yellow Lemon is one of the colors I chose to remain on my palette, in place of cad. yellow light, when I started thinning out my prismatics⁶. It is a great mixer and has a pronounced effect on high key (almost white) colors. Sometimes it can be used as a unique replacement for white in lightening up colors- giving dark colors a hint of coppery airiness, for example.

A friend of mine would often jokingly suggest that all colors should have "a touch of Indian Yellow", and it is tempting to exploit its golden warmth. Indian Yellow is very transparent and doesn't over-yellow mixtures. This color was originally made from bull urine and Winsor Newton’s synthetic replacement has the best rich, transparent urine-like glow.

I recently replaced Mars Yellow with this color. It’s a little more transparent and a little more subtle. It's an earthy yellow or an orangish Raw Sienna.

A classic earth color with its dignified light- reddish brown. I struggle with whether to use only transparent brown oxide, but it seems I'm always coming across situations where only this color will do. This brown has an opaque dramatic presence, strait from the tube, that transparent brown oxide lacks, but it doesn't mix as beautifully.

A cool red that seems almost like an earth color because of its deep richness and its "off" quality. It can seem like a blue-grey when placed on a field of mostly yellow-orange colors. I have always found it to be the most strange and beautiful in these types of relationships. Its glow is like the glow of a pine trunk, on a wet day, at twilight.

(On Palette for about 6 years)

More bluish than most blacks. This color opens doors when mixing bluish variations, as in shadows in the middle of a clear day. Also good for mixing off greens by adding yellows or oranges.

Here let me add that very strange greens can also be mixed by combining yellow and purple. Its good to remember these odd cross-mixtures, which create colors like jazz chords.

Rembrandt Ultramarine Blue

(On Palette for about 8 years)

A rich purplish blue, like the zenith of a dry clear sky. Very transparent and widely used.

Rembrandt Cool Gray

(On Palette for about 4 years)

A nice opaque battleship gray. This color often gets laid down pure. It's very intense against complex muddy mixtures.

Rembrandt Warm Gray

(On Palette for about 5 years)

This is about the same value as cool gray, but it's not as harsh. It's more soft and milky. An extremely subtle silver green, as seen sometimes in the reflective surfaces of a live oak.

Rembrandt Manganese Blue Phthalo

It’s like a transparent cerulean blue. Its weak tinting power helps avoid the out of control intensity of the opaque, saturated Cerulean. Of course, cerulean is always in reserve if I need it. Skies at the horizon are far too often interpreted as this color. Particularly in the humid south, it is rare that there is any blue near the horizon.

(On and Off Palette for about 8 years)

(On Palette for about a year)

Currently, the only green on my palette, though I really like Viridian and Chromium Oxide Green. For greens, I prefer play with cross mixtures.

It is useful to avoid constantly interpreting grass and trees as green. This, I believe, is a strong mental habit. Whenever possible, I try to consider first the warmth of the light or the effect of the sky reflection. True greens only pop up here and there. The constant seeing of greens inhibits the seeing of the envelope of light⁹.

Titanium White

(On Palette most always)

A cool opaque white. This white is used most often to bring colors to their higher keys. I prefer its brilliancy over Zinc White, but I occasionally have a change of heart.

THE PALETTE BOX

Over the years, I have gradually decreased the prismatic colors on my palette. But, occasionally I want that extra boost. Therefore, I do keep a reserve of the following in my box: Cadmium Yellow Medium, Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Red Medium, Acura Red, Acura Violet, Manganese Violet, and Cerulean Blue. Old Holland Scarlet Lake Extra and Liquitex Medium Magenta are my extra intense reserves.

I also keep Zinc White in my box in case I feel that I really need a warm transparency in my white.

Conclusion: The Attitude Toward the Palette and Nature

The full color palette provides a language for and helps create full color seeing. In manipulating and refining the full color language, I have manipulated and refined my senses. In exploring the complexities of color relationships, each painting, like each moment in time becomes increasingly unique, while also becoming more a part of an organic whole.

Although there are many elements to painting, color has been given extreme priority in my painting. This odd arrangement of art elements is well described by John Ruskin:

...The whole value of what you are about depends on color. If the color is wrong:, everything is wrong : just as, if you are singing, and sing a false notes, it does not matter how true your words are. If you sing at all, you must sing sweetly; and if you color at all, you must color rightly. Give up all the form, rather than the slightest part of the color: just as, if you felt yourself indanger of a false note, you would give up the word, and sing a meaningless sound, if you felt that so you could save the note. Never mind the houses are all tumbling down,- though your clouds are mere blots, and your trees mere knobs, and your sun and moon like crooked sixpences, - so only that your trees, clouds, houses and sun or moon, are of the right colors (135).

The study of color is not seeking an empirical "right", but seeking to broaden the scope and poetry of my senses. When I deeply penetrate a color it becomes a feeling like an unnamable complex emotion. The world of modern color deserves this attention because "sequences of color are like those of sound, and susceptible of all the complexity and passion of the most accomplished music" (Ruskin 134).

Footnotes

¹Native earths and treated earths have always been used by oil painters. They are literally dug from the earth, examples being ochre and raw umber. They are sometimes treated, as in the calcination used to produce burnt umbers and siennas. They tend to be inexpensive and reliable for permanency (Mayer 34-5).

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²A common practice in pre-impressionist painting, particularly in the academies, is the use of underpainting. This underpainting was generally executed in dullish brown monotone and allowed painters to work out drawing and tone before concerning themselves with color. The most simplified and stereotypical way of developing a painting from an underpainting would be to glaze the local color (surface color) of objects on top of the underpainting (like hand coloring a black and white photograph). This and its many permutations, including the deliberate overuse of browns in direct painting, characterize what I have come to understand as the "brown school" formula for painting. The result is the dull color (such as Van Dyke Brown) which is always influential as the base of contrast for other colors. Other colors are "keyed" off of a consistent base color. The Plein-Air practice of using white canvas as a base began to challenge this formula and the idea of creating a unique color key specific to painting is most evident with Monet.

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³In The Art of Color , Johannes Itten draws the following conclusions:

Among painters, I perceive three different attitudes toward problems of color.

First there are the epigoni, having no coloration of their own but composing after the manner of their teachers or other exemplars.

The second group is that of the "originals" -- those who paint as they themselves are. They compose according to their subjective timbre. Though the theme changes, the chromatic expression of their painting remains the same...

The third group is that of the universalists -- artists who compose from inclusive, objective considerations. Each of their compositions, according to the subject to be developed, has a different color treatment. That there should be but few painters in this group is understandable, for their subjective timbre must comprehend the entire color circle, and this happens rarely. Besides, they must possess high intelligence, admitting of a comprehensive philosophy (30).

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⁴Prismatic color are colors which most intensely correspond to the colors produced by a prism. They are arranged on my palette a bit differently than in a prism. An example of an arrangement of prismatic colors from left to right on my palette is as follows: Cadmium Yellow Light, Cadmium Yellow Medium Cadmium Yellow Deep, Cadmium Orange, Cadmium red light, Cadmium red Medium Cadmium Red Deep, Acura red, Acura Violet, Manganese Violet, Ultramarine Blue, Cerulean Blue, Turquoise Blue, Viridian. When I first started painting, my palette had mainly these artificially prepared mineral colors and synthetic organic pigments - products of modern chemistry (Mayer 34-5).

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⁵Master Color Teacher Henry Henche says, "The Rank Beginner must make exaggerated statements to begin with for he gains a strength in this approach and makes quicker progress than a student who constantly soft pedals his mistakes" (32).

Faber Birren discussed the common state of color vision as follows:

If the human sense of vision labors doggedly to throw all stimuli into a minimum number of groups, then it must have the desire to see few colors rather than many... Language itself gives further evidence of this human tendency to see few rather than many colors. When asked, the average person can mention only about 30 distinct color names! Language expresses what is in the minds of men. If men were interested in the subtleties of the spectrum the dictionary would be packed with terms. As it is, they are quite satisfied with an extremely simple color vocabulary.

Surely the eye sets morals of its own when it calmly takes thousands of colors measurable in a spectrometer, and molds them into few colors. It thereby admonishes the colorist that it has simple tastes (258-59).

When one stretches their color range and mixes little, they are humbly admitting to this crudeness in seeing color relationships. This is a powerful way to "climb from a savage state to a clearer and clearer elevation of the uncontaminated mind, to one with wisdom and vision" (Robichaux 53).

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⁶Through the years I have been reducing the prismatic colors on my palette as part of my growth towards keener color seeing.

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⁷Hensche explains, "Rembrandt used warmer colors. Valazquez used more black to modulate things. His painting have a pearly look. Cezanne brought up the fact that most colors in nature are subdued colors. Well, they are. Only a few thing in nature are primary colors, like flowers. So your development is to go from over-colored notes to the more neutral shades, which most of nature is seen in" (Robichaux 113)

Now, prismatics are mostly mixers, or the rarely used supporting cast of paintings that strive for "hauntingly beautiful colors that have, as yet, no name" (Hensche 90).

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⁸When I find that one color is being overused and has a overbearing dominance from painting to painting, I remove it from my palette and force my mind to seek other solutions. For example, there are currently no intense violets on my palette. Now, when I see a violet, I have to mix it. I may decide on mixing a red and blue, but I will try to tailor my mixture to an odd combination like orange and turquoise.

A color, like Acura Red, may initially serve as a liberator, when it is the unexpected to be seen in nature, but later become a new mental shackle. This process creates an evolution of the palette, where a color will rise to the surface, cover everything, and then is removed for its over-assertiveness. Then, like a used volcano, it becomes dormant for a long period.

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⁹Joachim Pissarro speaks keenly on the envelope of light regarding Monet:

What Monet wanted to reproduce is the distance between the cathedral and his own eyes. It could be said that Monet did not, in fact, paint the cathedral. He painted this invisible mass of air between himself and the cathedral, composed of innumerable waves of sunlight, intertwined with mist and cold, that make the cathedral visible.

The envelope filters Monet's vision of the cathedral. It colors the walls and thickens the presence of the monument; it makes the pale, neutral stone of the cathedral shine with dazzling brightness, from near-white to golden yellow, or freeze in an ethereal solid merging with the cobalt blue sky (22).

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Bibliography 

Birren, Faber. The Story of Color: From Ancient Mysticism To Modern Science. Westport: The Crimson Press, 1941.

Itten, Johannes. The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1961.

Hensche, Henry. The Art of Seeing and Painting. Thibodaux: Portier Gorman, 1988.

Mayer, Ralph. The Artists Handbook of Materials and Techniques. New York: Viking, 1970.

Pissarro, Joachim. Monet’s Cathedral: Rouen 1892-1894. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

Robichaux, John W. Henche on Painting: A Student’s Notebook. Thibodaux: Portier Gorman, 1997.

Ruskin, John. The Elements of Drawing. New York: Dover, 1971.

VITA