[John de la Vega]

Ah, the desire to find formulas to paint flesh! Probably as old as the cave paintings. All the non-adherence to formula - advice and individual - subject flesh tones given here is excellent advice.

Since color and, being a portraitist, flesh colors are subjects dear to my painter's heart, here's goes my hat in the ring (or some such expression).

In my experience, paying close attention to the light, its quality and quantity, as Brian Neher so aptly advices, is the most important factor affecting our use of color, in the flesh and everywhere else. Reading the light environment, the amount of light diffusion, temperature, brightness, and other subtle factors which affect our perception and our capacity to fully understand what we are looking at in order to paint it requires knowledge and practice. I recommend Ted Seth Jacobs' "Light for the Artist", a must read - and - use book for the understanding of light and form, the main equation of painting. That's our true starting point, remembering that LIGHT IS COLOR AND COLOR IS LIGHT


LIGHT = color = FORM


Light makes love to the form, and their instant offspring is color. "Charles Hawthorne on Painting" is indeed a terrific book for understanding painting color. I had the great fortune to study with one of Hawthorne's disciples, Henry Hensche, before he died a few years ago. Henry revolutionized, even more than his teacher, the way color was and is being taught in this country.

For him, all painters before the Impressionists painted 'mud'. Not quite the case, of course, but Henry had a very forceful, often dogmatic, way of gaining converts to his religion of seeing and painting color in a new way. If you don't believe me, seek out some of his color - happy disciples (among whom I do not quite include myself) such as Susan Sarback, bless her dear painter's heart, who wrote a great book called "Painting Radiant Colors in Oils". Henry Hensche's tremendous legacy is alive and well all over this country and probably the world, and his principles and techniques are still being taught in his school in Provincetown, Mass.

For fair light skin tones, especially in the lighter areas, I DO NOT recommend using any of the Cad Reds, including Vermillion. The reason is that the Cads do not really mix well with white. The cads are great as modifiers in those subtle mixtures for transition areas where the form / light changes very delicately, on the smallish planes, and for glazes and feathery scumbles (ah, transitions and edges, one of the main themes of my next book, which I seem to be writing right here).

Nothing wrong with a base of some yellow and some red for the light skin which we can then modify at will depending upon illumination, skin color, etc. The red I use is Rose, and the yellow I use is Naples Deep. A delightful, smiling woman in one of my last workshops said "I only use Rose when I paint flowers'. Rose and Naples, of course, already have some white in them, and they mix beautifully together and with white and other yellows and reds, as long as they are together to begin with. As anybody who paints knows, mixing goes on constantly. The trick is to keep color clean by smart and controlled mixing strategies. Best Rose: Old Holland Schveningen Rose Deep (expensive). Best Naples Yellow Deep (you guessed it): Old Holland (not expensive). A beautiful, not expensive Rose is Rowney Rose, made by Daler-Rowney. Unless you happen to be painting in Bangladesh, and ran out of Old Holland Naples Deep, why not use the best?

I also DO NOT recommend the use of Burnt Umber, or any browns for that matter (with the exception of Burnt Sienna, judiciously), on ANY part of the skin, including shadows. Even in those 'dead' shadows and 'dead' middle tones (if there is such a thing, which I suppose depends on the blimey light or, our capacity to see how light creates movement and vibration even in the shadows), using browns such as Burnt Umber is a recipe to end up with Henry's worst mud.

We should also remember that 'painting what we see' in the way of color is NOT always the best artistic strategy, no matter how realistically we wish to paint, especially in the first stages of the painting. One of the most important things I learned from the great Nelson Shanks is "Start Bright! (high chroma, even on the garish side)". As subtle modeling and refining progresses, color will find its way to reality, if 'local' color, vibrant or dull, is what you're intent on seeing and painting

I mix my browns with Rose, Alizarin (or Carmin Lake, a better Old Holland Alizarin) and bright or not so bright yellowish Greens, even an occasional smidget of Ultramarine, Cobalt, Magenta (I highly recommend Maimieri Puro Verzino Violet, a fabulous, rich, inexpensive Magenta ), or Dioxazine Mauve, adding cads and other reds as needed, for maximum VIBRANCY in the shadows. If there is a formula for color, whether on flesh, an apple, or a sunset, the recipe is simple:

MAKE IT VIBRATE

VIBRATION is, after all, in the very nature of light and, come to think of it, in the very nature of form itself(eternal dance of the atoms and molecules). Nobody understood this better than the Impressionists. They changed our vision and how we deal with color as painters and art lovers forever.

Next chapter: Ah, those middle tones! or, as my friend and fellow Sorolla lover the late Adrian Hernandez, a wonderful pastellist, once remarked as he looked at one of my pastels: "How to you make those darn things (the middle tones) look light and dark at the same time?"