Stepping on the path to Enwhitenment

The work I have done with the recent snow has highlighted to me my ignorance about white and I have determined I will make better use of it in future. It has forced me out of my comfort zone and made me treat white as a colour in its own right. I have yet to fully resolve them but there have been some very interesting moments featuring off-whites in ultra close harmony which do strange things to your eyes and perception, turning the surface into an apparent source of light. In particular white modified by a blue-green like viridian or pthalo-cyanine is startling when adjacent to white modified by a violet. My initial impression is that if you start with two colours close enough to each other to clash and use them to tweak different areas of the same white, strange things happen.

It is time I understood all this.

Left is a sketch of Runnymede in a break in the snowstorm with the Egham skyline as a dark streak in the distance. The sky is based on Zinc White. I painted this to explore the cold in the aftermath of seeing Grayson Perry and Will Self talking about Hunters in the Snow. I realised part way through that, since we are all used to seeing the world blurred by camera and speed, smearing the horizon would speak of the harshness of the wind here, almost as if the wind is whipping the paint across the canvas. It was also conceived as a vehicle to explore my new tube of paint - Winsor and Newton Iridescent White.

When I first saw this paint I assumed we would be talking about oil on water types of iridescence and I was both excited (having read the Seven Deadly Colours: The Genius of Nature's Palette in which the author examines seven ways nature generates colour, pigment being just one and iridescence being another) and wary as I thought it could be uncontrollable. In fact it is ground up mica coated in the same pigment as titanium white and has a very subtle shimmer. In use it is reminiscent of some of the more subtle shimmering make-ups and body-lotions out there - it turns out there's a good reason for that! I have yet to play with mixing colours in, but for pristine snow its subtle pearlescent quality adds a cute little something which you would not be able to put your finger on.

The big problem for me is its sheer warmth doesn't cut it in this context. Fortunately it allows colours beneath it to glow through so I painted the foreground with a mirror image of the sky in alizarin crimson, lemon yellow and ultramarine before adding a coat a of zinc white and finally a heavier coat of iridescent white which was worked entirely horizontally to emphasise the movement on the horizon. This all gave it a blushing, shimmering coldness which doesn't photograph at all but does enchant me and leaves me desperate to know more about the colour.

The first step on the road to mastery of the colour white is to gain understanding. As and when I can sell some junk on ebay I will invest in a tin of the lead-iest lead white of all, Cremnitz to round out my options. I think I will be able to make use of its relative warmth and texture in interesting ways. Soon I will have whites based on titanium, zinc, lead and mica. To explore these I will work on small, postcard sized canvases or boards, probably with one repeated composition. It may end up half colour chart, half weather forecast and half Ben Nicholson. I suspect each will be a moment of stillness if seen individually, or a bewildering chaos if put together. We'll see.

My seven step plan is as follows:

Step one: Complete my palette of different coloured whites
Step two: Play
Step three: Immerse myself in the work of Ben Nicholson and Giorgio Morandi (there happens to be a show in Islington until April which is a bonus)
Step four: Undertake my series of postcard sized experiments
Step five: Remake my snowscapes with this new-found skill and understanding
Step six: Translate this palette for use in landscapes which are not covered in snow - perhaps concrete in bright sunlight, tarmac in the rain and southern England's characteristic flat, overcast skies
Step seven: Gather these into a small show that shows a compelling progression - initial sketches > experiments > sketches reworked into proper paintings > paintings from step six.