I love white paint – titanium white, to be precise. I use a giant gob on my palette with every painting I make. White paint is a workhouse for mixing tints like a lovely pink when mixed with permanent rose or a pure aqua when mixed with phthalo blue. I usually start off painting by mixing up a big batch of grays using titanium white with ultramarine blue and burnt umber. I add titanium white to yellow ochre when I don’t have any Naples yellow and I use it for highlights with a little cad yellow or red. Painting whites, however, is a challenge when it is the dominant color in the subject such a a Great Egret. How do you make anything white look like it has any form or interesting? Up until recently I would shy away from the challenge until I actually tried to paint one.
When I don’t know where to start and need inspiration, I often look to the masters, particularly John Singer Sargent who was unabashed in his use of white paint. I looked at his paintings of Italian gardens which are replete with sculptures and other structures mostly made up of what the human eye perceives of as “white”. I looked at the white silk dresses of society ladies. I looked at his paintings of Venetian churches in search of the color “white”. When I looked closely these “whites” were not just lead white or whatever he used but a myriad of colors. I always admired Sargent’s use of white as highlights on the Chinese vase in the “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit”. There is a boldness and crispness of a master who knew that white is not the absence of hue but a container of the entire spectrum of white light. His whites capture the scattering of all the colors in the visible spectrum and reflects it back to us so what we see is something that registers as form in the color of “white”. It is tricky to add color to white without losing its “white-ness” yet often the lightest color in your painting can act as white with respect to your mid-tones and darks. So after checking out Sargent’s paintings, I got inspired to give this white bird a go.
Although my bird is technically “white”, when I color picked several areas of the finished painting including the head, tail and wing, Photoshop picked up colors other than white.
The reason other colors than white get picked up has to do with the underpainting and my approach with the subject matter. I tried to see the egret as not just a white bird but as a reflection of its environment. The bird was brilliantly lit against a dark background. I know that the light of the sky and the reflections of the feathers made the bird “white” but what made up the light? Although the sky is blue it is not entirely so. The color of the sun effects the color of the sky so I decided to start with a red-orange ground to reflect the light and to tamp down the dominant greens in blues in the photograph. I then sketched out the bird in violet that was mixed from ultramarine blue, burnt umber and cad red and titanium white. This helped give the bird some structure and depth before I started to apply the whites. I mixed the whites starting with a lot of titanium white and a hint of either cad red, ultramarine blue, cad yellow and a touch of my pre-mixed gray. The dark background acted as a strong contrast against the the bird that reinforces the whiteness of this bird which is much more than a single color.