colour in a painting . . .

. . . is different than thinking or "recognizing" colours.  That last Home Portrait was so unsatisfying because of the colours.  The building was red brick.  The vegetation was green. The sky was blue.  BUT . . . why was that nowhere near the experiance of the scene?


I guess it struck me as I was watching a show on Modigliani - why did he get a likeness when his "formula" was so graphic?  Why did he remove so much detail? Even the pupils of the eyes were gone after a while.   I drifted off pondering these things, musing on that horrid home painting - musing why it was so flat and primitive and really, to me, boring.  If I manage to market this product - I'll get lots of red brick, summer portraits in this area so I better find some way of making them beautiful.  

I desaturated the painting - it was distorted.  The greys were very uneven, ungrounded.  I wondered if that was a result of the colour palette.  Every colour was represented - almost evenly and veery highly saturated too.  In attempting to define each element in the painting I was isolating each one.  The "lost line" is hard to define with opposing colours.  I really need to find a way to leave the colour till the end of the process.  So if I decide to start the image in basically a monochrome . . . not greyscale NO MOOD - that was abhorant to me.  I decided I should focus on an initial wash of the canvas, then blendup to a colour that represents the element.  


EXPERIMENT #1

 

So here is the test pic.  Is this image blue? green?  or yellow?  It is not red although I might play with that to learn more.

  

I think they are all very different.