Category Archives: Color & Technique

The Colors with No Name

An interesting thing I read lately was in a Van Gogh letter written in July of 1882, five years before he went to Arles and started putting down the blaring yellows everybody knows him for. He was writing to his brother Theo and talking about color:

Absolute black doesn’t in fact occur. Like white, however, it’s present in almost every colour and forms the endless variety of greys - distinct in tone and strength. So that in nature one in fact sees nothing but these tones or strengths.

The last sentence is a bold claim. In nature one in fact sees nothing but these tones or strengths. Not red, not blue, not green-grays, but mixed, broken, in-between tones that don’t have names. He goes on to list a few of them (red-gray, yellow-gray, blue-gray, green-gray, orange-gray, violet-gray) and then basically shrugs, saying the variations are infinite and there’s no way to catalog them. The point seems to be that named colors are a convenient shorthand but not really what you’re looking at when you look at anything. What we see is the unnamed middle.

Van Gogh said the colorist is somebody who can look at a color in nature and analyze it - say, this green-gray is mostly yellow with a little black and almost no blue - and then mix it. The solution isn’t having a tube for every situation but knowing how to interpret a color’s makeup. He says that understanding the three primaries plus black and white is worth more than seventy pre-mixed shades, because more than seventy tones can be made from the fundamentals and none of the pre-mixed ones are going to match what you’re looking at anyway.


He comes back to the idea in another letter three years later when talking about painting a head, and he describes seeing it as “a harmony of reddish brown, violet, yellow, all broken - I’ll put a violet and a yellow and a reddish brown on my palette, and break them into each other.” Breaking them into each other is the working method. Put down a few colors, often complements or near-complements, and mix them partially - not all the way to gray, but partly. What results is a broken tone, a color that started as one thing, ran into another, and landed somewhere in between.

The technical idea of “broken tone” is straightforward: when you mix two complementary colors in unequal proportions, they partially neutralize each other and you end up with a gray with a bias. Put that broken tone next to a pure version of either parent, and the pure one will sing. Put two broken tones of different bias next to each other, and they have more of a quiet interaction instead of fighting with each other.


This is why a canvas with only pure colors can feel garish and somehow flat at the same time. Every color is at maximum volume, so nothing is actually loud. Simple tints and shades of these do not add real depth, but introduce a range of broken tones and the pure notes finally have somewhere to stand out from. The unnamed middle is doing the structural work and the named colors get the credit.


You can see it in Van Gogh’s own paintings, though you would think he completely abandoned grays for saturation when he moved to France. The Potato Eaters (1885) is almost entirely broken tones - reddish-browns, greyed yellows, violet-leaning shadows, a sickly green cast to the skin. Almost no pure color anywhere but it’s not muddy. Tones are clearly distinct from each other because each one is deliberately made and placed in relation to the ones around it. Three years later he’s in Arles painting chrome yellow sunflowers and the red-green clamor of The Night Café and it looks like the work of a different painter. But if you squint at that painting, the strong colors recede and what holds the thing together is a substructure of in-between tones. The Arles saturation didn’t replace the gray years, the gray years made the Arles saturation possible.


For me, applying this sort of thing has mostly meant mixing grays on purpose instead of just tinting black or raw umber. Combining complements in unequal proportions and paying attention to what bias comes out will change what your eyes do when you look at anything. The shadow on a white wall isn’t just gray. It’s probably a blue-violet-gray leaning warm, or a green-gray leaning cool, depending on what’s lighting it and what’s reflecting onto it. This will develop with experience. To this point I’ve been lucky to be able see the makeup of a color I’m trying to match in terms of the tubes of paint I have in the box. And so far I have been able to get anywhere I need to go with the fifteen or so tube colors I keep around, my basic color alphabet. 


A lot of this is just basic color-mixing technique and not news to anybody who’s been painting for a while, but Van Gogh’s framing is an interesting way to think about the in-between colors and the load they carry. Most of what you’re looking at doesn’t have a name. That’s not a problem to solve, it’s just the thing you’re painting.

Categories: Color & Technique

Unlearning with Monet

Copy of Monet’s The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (2024)
The last time I was doing any kind of representative painting I was focused on heavy realism. That was around twenty years ago (!) and it has been interesting to see how strong the tendency still is to want to wring detail out of the new stuff. I had always pushed toward photorealism with the still life compositions and felt like the surrealistic paintings also hit harder when they looked more like a photo, but this time around with straight-up landscapes, I’m feeling like high realism makes for a less interesting painting. Scrapping detail, however, is sometimes easier said than done.

So to loosen things up I switched to acrylic paint and started going a lot faster. I also went back and did a crash study on Claude Monet and other early impressionists and painted a few copies in early 2024. Unsurprisingly the Monets that helped the most in preparing for the coastal theme were some of the Saint-Adresse paintings done in and around 1867. It’s always interesting with impressionists to note what gets left out because it’s a window into what the painter sees and how they prioritize visual elements. Of course lighting drives a lot of those decisions, but the organization of color is often where the creativity lives in impressionism. To me this is the greatest value of Monet - abstracting color without tipping completely over into unnatural palettes.

Part of my unlearning has been to literally unfocus my eyes, not just to identify the light blocks, but to break down the color as well. “Paint what you see” is about 90 percent of the representative painting advice I can give, and a way to apply that advice to myself in this case is to hinder the view. I don’t know how well the tactics are working so far though - old habits die hard and I think I’m mostly painting realism with an impressionist edge. I have enjoyed revisiting Monet though and I’ve always learned something whenever I’ve copied the work of the greats.

Categories: Color & Technique

Where Olive Meets Periwinkle

Waders on a Sandbar (2026)
The unlimited ways that bodies of water can appear has been an attraction for me with these coastal paintings. Previously I had not spent a lot of time reducing something like a view of the ocean to its basic form, so this has been a good personal exercise in detaching context from a familiar environment and simply seeing the light, hues, and shapes as they are. In doing that I’ve finally started recognizing the really interesting and unexpected color combinations that appear when water, sunlight, reflection, shadow, and subsurface elements collide.

There is a particular cast to Gulf water west of Mobile Bay. It’s not altogether unique, but familiar in the northwestern Gulf Coast and different from the celebrated pthalo of the panhandle. Watching my kids out on a submerged sandbar on a sunny day, I started looking at the shallow span in between that was free of breakers but full of motion. Two absolutely distinct colors were on display - the bright periwinkle of the reflected surface and olive wavelets revealing the mixed hues of the water and sand. Seeing such different colors alternating side by side is interesting. The combination clashes happily in bright sunlight and does a lot to give the impression of movement when you paint it.

The paint color for the olive will vary depending on water depth, time of day, and what beach you’re standing on. I’ve gotten a pretty serviceable Mississippi Sound olive with a base of burnt umber, yellow ochre, and Prussian blue, maybe a cadmium yellow boost if it’s sunny. For a convincing periwinkle I’ve been mostly happy mixing a sky blue from Prussian blue and white, then adding alizarin crimson to taste and then black or raw umber to muddy it up. I was finding that starting with pink pushes the mix too much toward purple and away from how the natural color looks. I don’t know why it should matter but for some reason starting out with the light blue helps me avoid that.

Olive and periwinkle. You won’t see this combination too much between Pensacola and Apalachicola, and you probably wouldn’t pick it for your living room, but it conveys a distinct Gulf Coast vibe all the same.

Categories: Color & Technique