Phil Starke Art Talk

Usually painting outside is a small, quick response to light and color before it changes, or gathering color notes for larger pieces in the studio.  Sometimes the challenge of painting large is a good way to change things or venture out of my comfort zone.  Usually 16 x 20 is as large as I will go and 6 x 8 is a nice size when traveling and stopping along the road for a quick sketch.

But painting larger outside, 20 x 24, or 24 x 30 allows me to push the limits of what I know technically.  It also forces you to just paint the heart of your subject matter because there isn’t enough time to approach it like a studio painting.  It’s not always successful but keeps me from looking at everything the same way.

There are two different ways to approach painting large outside, one is to make a note of the time of day and return two or three times until you finish.  The other way is to get the composition and planes blocked in, enough color notes on the canvas, then return to the studio and finish without loosing the sponteniety of painting outside.

When painting, outside or inside, a bright or sunlit object, we tend to think in terms of stronger or more saturated color, or color straight from the tube to make it stand out more.  In reality we need to think just the opposite.  When we’re painting an object in a landscape or still life that seems stronger in color it’s always more effective to desaturate or neutralize the colors around the bright object to make it standout.

For example, a mountain being lit by the setting sun will look intense and full of sunlight only if I reduce the saturation of the surrounding sky, trees and foreground with grayer, cooler color.  With a limited palette of red, yellow, blue and white, I can pick one color and add a small amount of the two remaining primaries or just one, add as much white as I need to achieve the right volue, then make sure the surrounding areas use enough of all three primary colors to become neutral or gray.  These gray colors need a predominant color but enough of the other two primaries to really knock them down in intensity.