Colour: Purism vs Purity

A couple of weeks back, while I was thinking about Pip Seymour's range of paints for my review, another artist mentioned in passing that she uses four paints and four paints only. She didn't say which four, but I would hazard a guess that she either meant the primaries (red, yellow and blue) and white or the process colours we are all familiar with from inkjet printers (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). Her logic is that that's enough, you can mix every colour from them. In theory she's right, that's why primary colours are called primary colours. It's a minimal, pure approach to mixing colour that requires a good level of discipline and skill. I have enormous respect for the simple purity of the approach, for the rigour and skill and for the sheer obstinacy of those who paint this way. On the other hand, I decry their blindness.

Colour, or hue,  is but one characteristic of a paint. It's the most important one admittedly, but colourmen don't waste their time crafting ranges of one or two hundred different paints for fun. They do it because the differences are real, tangible and precious. The characteristic that fascinates me most is transparency. Some paints are like placing a thin layer of coloured glass above your work, or pointing a coloured lamp at it. Others completely obliterate everything they touch. Then there are semi-transparent and semi-opaque colours in-between. There are even different feels of transparency - some stain, some glow, some are even waxy. Its not just transparency either. Stiffness, the way a paints holds a mark, texture, behaviour during mixing and drying characteristics all vary from pigment to pigment. They all make making and using good paint more complex but have the potential to add infinite richness to a painting.

Let's stop talking abstractly and think about actually mixing colours and look at the consequences of the two approaches. If we want a red, there may be no real difference between the two. Both the 4 colour artist and over-stocked artist will take their red and adjust it slightly with a yellow or a blue. Both have used two pigments and both will have done the same amount of mixing so both will have a colour of similar purity.

What happens if we want a red that is the same colour but moved a little towards dark grey? Tinting with white is a good approach to de-saturating colour, but no good if we want to be dark. We can tone with black if its in our paintbox but general purpose blacks tend to deaden colour. So ideally, we add the complementary colour to red, in this case green. So the over-stocked painter picks out a dull green and mixes a tiny bit with his unmixed red and if he chooses correctly, he has a greyed version of his red. The 4 colour painter can't simply add green because he doesn't have any. Instead he has to juggle red, yellow and blue and try very hard to prevent his end colour being muddy. So in this instance, the over-stocked painter has still only used two pigments so his finished colour is still quite pure and clean and has the potential for further tweaking, whereas the 4 colour painter has used three and possibly four colours and is having to be very alert to prevent his grey becoming a muddy brown. The same is true - only more so - for browns and proper greys. The less dogmatic of the two will simply pick out a paint made from a single pigment which is nigh on perfect to start with and then tweak it slightly, giving clean luminous browns, or he will pick out two complementary colours for clear, glowing greys. The 4 colour artist again and again has to use all of four of his colours resulting in an ever increasing danger of ill-defined, inaccurate and contaminated colour. This is a huge problem when you consider that apart perhaps from tropical seascapes at noon pretty much all of nature - including human skin tones - features greys and browns by the bucket-load.

By now you know where I'm coming from. I do not believe that in the real world the four colour theory holds water. Although every hue is possible, the price in terms of clarity, cleanliness, saturation and variety is too high for me. I have too many colours but, at this stage in my career, I think I should be trying as many different paints as possible to find what works for me. Maybe it counts as an addiction, but my increasing love and appreciation of colour gives me great joy and leads to paintings which live and breathe and (midnight paintings aside) have a certain luminous quality of which I am proud.

Words are not the way to progress this argument. I would suggest that anyone interested might spend some time on the Vasari website looking both at the swatches as a whole and reading the detailed descriptions of individual colours. I'll give you a starting point - many painters consider Pthalo Blue and Prussian Blue to be more or less the same.