These are oil paintings on canvas, each 12"x16" and each done with the Zorn palette (except on the right, it looks like I may have picked up a little ultramarine blue at the end and put it on the hair and maybe some bits of cadmium yellow, also at the end), painted around 2006. The painting on the left is a self-portrait, done while staring in a mirror (and, no, I don't literally look like that, though I certainly painted what I felt at the time); the painting on the right is my version of a color copy of a work by an artist unknown to me. (This was an exercise from my then teacher, John Paul Thornton.)
The Zorn palette, named after a turn of the century (19th to 20th) Swedish painter, consists of white, ivory black, a yellow and a red (so I was told). I think I used yellow ocher and cadmium red, as my yellow and red on the copy of the unknown painting; I think I used alizarin crimson as my red on the self-portrait.
What you will quickly discover with this palette is that colors are relative. Your black and white mixes will look blue-ish, and your yellow and black mixes will look green-ish. If you take your black and white mix and mix it with your red, you will get something purple-ish, and so on. You can get a lot of beautiful colors from mixing these four colors in varying proportions.
In trying to re-construct when these were painted, I googled this wonderful artist, John Paul Thornton, whom I was lucky enough to learn from when he taught at the now closed Fine Artists Factory in Pasadena. His blog is aptly called Art and Courage; apparently he will have a book, available in June, also called Art and Courage. If you are interested in learning from a great teacher, I recommend checking it out. If it is anything like his in-person lessons, it will be well worth looking for.
Will check out that site. But actually, I'm learning a great deal from you. (Very interesting to enlarge these and study your brush strokes.)
ReplyDeleteI'm glad. The googling Thornton shortly after he announced the book was quite a coincidence. I have no idea about what the book will be, except that he was a terrific story teller/teacher, so it ought to be informative and interesting.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the visit. Although I'm not familiar with the Zorn Palette I do recall an assignment professor Dr Thompson gave us "back when" that is similar. In my case I was allowed two colors plus white. I chose alizeran crimson and yellow ocher. I probably cheated but we were told to look at the work of Morandi.
ReplyDeleteI think in art, it's called creativity; no two people will do exactly the same thing with any art assignment. I just recently became aware of Morandi (demonstrating the extent of my ignorance); pretty much a still life god.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this post, Jean. I'd never heard of the Zorn palette, but I've always found that limiting choices in any way, be it a limited palette or some other restriction, seems to free up my creativity. I love what you've done - the portrait on the right especially.
ReplyDeleteExactly; it's much easier to be creative with fewer choices. The Zorn palette is actually a real choice, not just an exercise, for realist oil painters of portraits--it produces amazing and beautifully subtle skin tones.
ReplyDeleteThe two examples of mine that I posted are not actually even the best examples of the subtlety possible that I've done (let alone actual masters of this palette). They're just the ones that I was able to find without much effort because I like them for other reasons and have kept them visible in the room in which I paint.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful colors..
ReplyDeleteThank you, A-B.
ReplyDelete