The Real Turner’s Yellow

This actually has nothing to do with J. M. W. Turner, although I did get excited when I saw “Turner’s Yellow” in the art supply store.

J. M. W. Turner’s Best and Worst?

The anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar—October 21, 1805—makes this week a great time to look more closely at two of Turner’s paintings I mentioned in last week’s post.

Turner and the Dark Side of the Sublime

I’ve been meaning to post about Joseph Mallord William Turner for quite a while.  Like other aspects of this blog, however, that got put on the back burner until  a few days ago, when, while reading about his oeuvre, I thought, if I’d had a chance to meet this guy, we probably would have had a lot to talk about!

Sublime Landscapes, Part 2

I’d like to direct your attention for a moment to another of my favorite paintings by another Hudson River School artist: The Icebergs, painted by Frederic Edwin Church in 1861.

Sublime Landscapes, Part 1

Yes, I’m still alive!  Between picking up extra shifts for vacationing coworkers, toying with an idea for a novel, and wandering around the Internet the way I used to wander the basement of the Engineering department of the local university whilst trying to find a way from one history class to the next without going outside…painting and blogging have been pushed to the back burner somewhat.

A major reason for my Internet wandering has been my increasing fascination with paintings like this:

The Perfect Green, Part 2

We left off last time at the end of the seventeenth century, with an increase in landscape painting.  The green pigments available at that time were simply not up to the challenging task of depicting the pure, intense greens found in nature.  Lamented Samuel van Hoogstraten:

I wish that we had a green pigment as good as a red or yellow.  Green earth is too weak, Spanish green [verdigris] too crude and ashes [green verditer] not sufficiently durable.(1)

Greens can, of course, be created by mixing blue and yellow, or glazing yellow over blue.  It’s something I’ve done very little of, still the method preferred by many painters, and something I should really experiment with more.  The green that comes out of a tube is rarely exactly the right shade.  But, just like purple, ready-mixed greens are beyond handy.

Little wonder, then, that the next bright green to appear was incredibly popular, even though it was also incredibly poisonous.

The Perfect Green, Part 1

I’ve added a new painting of Mount Temple to the Studio Page, but that isn’t what I want to write about today.

I tend to have several books on the go, and so I’m still reading Philip Ball’s Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), at the same time as I’ve been on a color-related quest of my own.  The weather hasn’t been great this week, but I have had a couple of chances to get out and paint. 

Indigomania

Back in March, I was working on this painting when I had a dream that left me awake at 5 AM, rushing in to the studio to continue adding glazes of white to the foggy early-morning sky:

In the dream, the painting was overflowing with purple.  No matter how much white paint I laid down, and how quickly, the purple kept flowing out from the horizon line,