In the 19th century (especially in Germany), painting recipes were developed that involved various combinations of tempera ingredients, often including some combination of egg white, whole egg, linseed oil, stand oil, dammar varnish, stand oil, and turpentine. You can find many such recipes on the internet with a few simple Google searches. I’ve usually avoided these relatively complex recipes in favor of simple emulsions of egg yolk (the traditional binder for egg tempera) and linseed or walnut oil, mixed with pigment/water paste.

Recently, I ran across a web reprint of Egg Tempera Painting, Tempera Underpainting, Oil Emulsion Painting: A Manual of Technique, by Vaclav Vitlacyl and Rupert Davidson Turnbull. Published in 1935, it is a compendium of various tempera techniques. One that caught my eye is a recipe they call “putrido.” Putrido is one name for tempera grassa (because it starts to smell bad after a few days). They say that this is based on a recipe from an old manuscript found in Venice. For all I know it’s what was used in the Renaissance.

Take whatever quantity of dry color you wish to prepare. Divide it into two equal parts. Rub up one part with yolk of egg only into a fairly stiff paste. Rub up the other part with sun-bleached linseed oil, to about the consistency of ordinary tube colours. (To save time or trouble, it is possible to use ordinary tube oil colours, but to be sure of your ingredients, it is always advisable to grind your own colour in oil.) The part that is rubbed up with oil may be slightly larger in quantity than the part rubbed with yolk of egg. Then take the two parts so prepared and grind them together, preferably on the marble slab. It will be found that when these two parts are put together, the resultant mixture will stiffen at once into a very stiff paste, too stiff to be easily rubbed. This may be softened down by the addition of either water, emulsion, or linseed oil. If you wish to use the Putrido in its leaner form, add either water or the emulsion (Medium Fat Emulsion), but if you wish to paint with it as an oil paint using oil as the medium, then thin it down with oil. In either case, add the water, the emulsion, or the oil very slowly, only a few drops at a time, until the paste becomes a smooth cream easily handled on the marble slab.

I find this to be pretty interesting. It is a recipe that is similar to what I’ve done before, is simple to make, doesn’t involve solvents, and uses egg yolk (rather than the white or the whole egg), with which I am more familiar. They suggest that adding a small amount of oil of clove will preserve the paint mixture and allow it to be kept for some time (although not indefinitely). I expect that storing them in a refrigerator, especially in warm weather, would be a good idea. The oil of clove would also act as a retarder for the oil component of the paint, causing to dry more slowly. That could be a good or a bad thing, but I expect one would have to wait between layers for the paint to dry. You could try to balance the retarding effect of the clove oil by adding a small amount of lead napthenate, but that makes for a more complex reaction than I am really comfortable with.

I’ll have to try this recipe soon. I have a large painting that I started in tempera and then stopped work on. It might make an excellent underpainting for this TG recipe.

RESISTANCE AND TROUBLE

We get ourselves into trouble because it’s a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is a faux form of fame. It’s easier to get busted in the bedroom with the faculty chairman’s wife than it is to finish that dissertation on the metaphysics of motley in the novellas of Joseph Conrad.

Ill health is a form of trouble, as are alcoholism and drug addiction, proneness to accidents, all neuroses including compulsive screwing-up, and such seemingly benign foibles as jealousy, chronic lateness, and the blasting of rap music at 110 dB from your smoked-glass ‘95 Supra. Anything that draws attention to ourselves through pain-free or artificial means is a manifestation of Resistance.

Cruelty to others is a form of Resistance, as is the willing endurance of cruelty from others.

The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work. The working artist banishes from her world all sources of trouble. She harnesses the urge for trouble and transforms it in her work.

To help you find the color harmonies most natural to you, take a rectangular surface, either canvas or paper, and divide it into twenty-four equal parts. Now squeeze out a full range of colors on your palette. (It is easier to do this in oils, but pastels or even poster colors will do.) Fill in each square with a color which seems to harmonize with both your wishes and with the other colors. The colors may be various shades of blue, if you have a very decided preference for blue to the exclusion of other hues. Or they may be fifteen squares of different hues, with nine squares of brown, red, or gray. Or they may all be primary colors.

No one can help or guide you in this exercise; you must reach down into the inner recesses of your mind’s eye, and record the colors you find there. It might be wise to repeat this exercise a number of times over a period of weeks, and average out the results. You will be surprised how constant your choices of colors will be, and how unlike any one else’s they are.

Once having found out which colors come naturally to you, be careful about departing too far from these combinations in your paintings. This constitutes your norm, and if you go outside it you will find that your personal delicate balance of harmonies will be upset, and you will be dissatisfied with the results.

—Hereward Lester Cooke, Painting Techniques of the Masters, New York: Watson Guptill Publications, 1972.

This book is not in print, but worth tracking down.

While Gates of Fire is (in my opinion) his best novel, I can strongly recommend this other accounts of people and events in the ancient Greek world, including Tides of War and The Last of the Amazons.

The War of Art is a nonfiction book about the inner struggle to realize a dream. It’s a condensation of what Pressfield learned about how to make art. In his case, that art is writing, but it’s equally applicable to making visual art.

The focus of the book is on overcoming Resistance. Resistance is what stops you from pursuing your art.

Look in your own heart. Unless I’m crazy, right now a still small voice is piping up. telling you as it has ten thousand times, the calling that is yours and your alone. You know it. No one has to tell you. And unless I’m crazy, you’re no closer to taking action on it than you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you.

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

Pressfield describes Resistance in all of its insidious forms. Then he talks about how to overcome it, as he has overcome it in the process of becoming a successful writer. The way to overcome Resistance is to become a professional. Not a professional in the sense of someone who works for a living, but in the sense of a person who does the work he knows he must do, no matter what.

A PROFESSIONAL ACTS IN THE FACE OF FEAR

The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.

What Henry Fonda does, after puking into the toilet in his dressing room, is to clean up and march out onstage. He’s still terrified but he forces himself forward in spite of his terror. He knows that once he gets out into the action, his fear will recede and he’ll be okay.

The book is structured into little one or two page sections (the quote above is all of one of them). Each section gives brutally honest advice about the reality of pushing yourself to focus on your art, ignore obstacles, and get the work done. It’s a little melodramatic in places, but that’s really what’s needed to make the points he needs to make.

I’ve been struggling with resistance over the last year; my output has gone down significantly. I have excuses for that: busy job, a very active two-year old, the need to spend quality time with my wife. But Resistance is a lot of why I have spent a lot of evenings not painting. This book isn’t going to cure that, but it puts the problem in perspective and points me in the direction I need to go. For that I am grateful.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone struggling to make art and finding that it’s hard to make yourself do the work.

Art in the Making: Rembrandt I don’t know enough about 17th century painting, so I blew a couple of Borders gift cards left over from Christmas on this book. It’s a detailed technical analysis of paintings by Rembrandt (and followers) in the National Gallery in London. I just got it, but it seems quite good so far. The folks at the National Gallery seem to really know their stuff; I’ve very much enjoyed two of their other books in the “Art in the Making” series. The other major book on the subject (in English) is Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, which I have not read.

My teacher, Dennis Cheaney, uses this approach. It is based on the method advocated by Ted Seth Jacobs, his teacher. Here’s what Ted says about this in “Light for the Artist,” the book I’ve quoted from in a number of posts.

Some painters prefer to work with the fewest possible colors (called a “limited palette”). The disadvantage to this method is that mixed colors are not quite as chromatically intense as their counterparts out of the tube. For example, an orange made of red and yellow loses some chromatic intensity as compared to tube orange. The limited palette reduces our available chromatic range.

Another one of Ted’s students, Tony Ryder, was profiled in a recent article in American Artist. His palette for one painting has 47 paints on it:

flake white, misty blue, zinc white, titanium white, Naples yellow green, jaune brilliant, Naples yellow light, Naples yellow, Naples yellow red, cadmium yellow lemon, cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, coral red, brilliant pink, cadmium red, cadmium red scarlet, alizarin crimson, rose grey, cobalt violet, cobalt violet light, Winsor violet, ultramarine violet, cobalt blue, king’s blue, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, cobalt green light, viridian, green grey, chrome oxide green, cinnabar green, Bohemian green earth, sap green, yellow ochre light, yellow grey, raw sienna, Old Holland ochre, deep ochre, raw umber greenish, mars yellow, mars orange, burnt sienna, mars violet, burnt umber, Van Dyke brown, Payne’s gray, ivory black.

That’s a lot of different paints.

I don’t claim to know more about painting than Ted Seth Jacobs, Tony Ryder, or Dennis Cheaney. But at my limited level of skill I do see a couple of problems with this approach. One is simply that it is much harder to learn the mixing characteristics of 47 paints as well as you can with, say, 6 paints. When mixed, pigments react in unpredictable ways. If you use a more “limited” palette, you can learn with great specificity the ways that each color mixes with every other color. If you don’t really know your colors, then you’ll often be surprised at the results of any given mixture. What you end up doing is having to fiddle with mixtures. You mix two paints, observe how the color shifts, then add another paint to compensate for the color mixing shift that you didn’t predict, then maybe have to do that once or twice more before the color is exactly right. As that happens, the chroma inevitably goes down. So you might have to then try to add some more of a brighter paint to pull the chroma back up. With this approach, you can spend a lot of time chasing color.

In his book, Ted also points out how mixing colors reduces chroma, but fails to account for that when he is selecting paints containing multiple pigments. In describing the value of a kitchen sink palette, he shows five different greens: gray green, sevres green, cobalt green light, cadmium green light, and olive green. The book was written awhile ago and he doesn’t say what brands he is using, but I think that at least two of those are multi-pigment paints. There is no such pigment as “cadmium green,” for example—it’s usually a blend of cadmium yellow and pthalo blue. Similarly, a number of the paints on Tony’s palette also contain multiple pigments. If the rationale for the large number of paints is to avoid chroma reduction from mixing, then I don’t see how it makes sense to choose paints that the manufacturers have already mixed for you. Paint companies don’t have any special way of mixing paint without the saturation costs that we have to cope with when we do the same thing on our palettes.

That is not to say that any of these guys don’t know how to mix paint. I’ve watched Dennis do it, and it’s impressive. In a few seconds, he’ll pull several colors together to produce a mixture with just the right value, hue, and chroma. But when I put that many colors onto my palette I get all mixed up. I lose track of which colors I’m using for what purpose. When mixing, I find myself either (a) using too many different paints in each mixture, chasing color all over the place, and tossing some mixtures and starting over; or (b) ignoring most of the paints on my palette and using only a few.

Nevertheless, some artists can manage a large palette of paints without apparent difficulty. Ted, Tony, and Dennis do it brilliantly. But it is not an approach that works for me.

Related article

Color and color mixing

The Inseparability of Value and Hue. Many painters, such as the surrealists, for example, lighten values only by adding white. They treat the value scale as if it were only a lightening and darkening of the same hue. This is a serious mistake for the optical artist. It is an essentially “black-and-white” approach. The result is similar to a colored drawing, with local colors washed over the value changes, and does not take into account the fact that the light is colored. Value and color change together, organically. We cannot run up and down the value scale without constantly varying the hue.

For example, if the light source has some kind of (unnameable!) yellowish coloration and the shadow turns correspondingly complementary, as the values darken the yellowness will also drop. We need to incorporate this hue change into each value change. We must see each change as a colored value. Otherwise we are essentially painting in a monochrome. We also must avoid “tinting” value changes with the same color. For example, if the light itself is yellowish, we ought not to put the same intensity of yellow everywhere in the light.

Also take care not to give the shadow the same kind of hue as the light. The color of the shadow can be deceptive. For example, when the body is under a yellowish light, the reflected light in the shadow may be very warm. However, approaching the terminator, where there is the least influence of reflected light, the shadow may show more of its complementary nature. Some students notice only the very warm reflected lights and paint all the shadow warm. This makes for a warm-on-warm effect that does not correspond with optical reality. The effect is rather heavy, or hot, and the picture will not have the feeling of light speeding through it. The hue will be turgid if it is too similar in the and the shadow.

Here’s Velazquez’ usual palette (which he seldom deviated from throughout his career):

White: lead white mixed with calcite (calcium carbonate).

Yellow: yellow ochre, lead tin yellow, and (rarely) Naples yellow.

Red: vermilion, a red earth (red ochre, burnt sienna, etc.), and a red lake (equivalent to alizarin crimson or madder lake).

Blue: azurite, ultramarine blue, smalt (a dark blue pigment made from ground glass).

Brown: brown earth, an umber (raw or burnt).

Green: mixtures of azurite and lead tin yellow.

Purple: mixtures of red lake and azurite.

That’s it. Often he used fewer colors; in Coronation of the Virgin he used only five pigments.

He probably had a mixture of calcite and oil on his palette that he would add to mixtures that he wanted to be more transparent. More opaque passages often show evidence of some sort of protein (probably either hide glue or egg yolk) added to the paint. He sometimes added a lot of oil to the paint, which has resulted in some yellowing (but not as much as you might expect).