Broken color

Don't want to overwhelm with new posts, but I have some catching up to do. I'll save the rest for later in the week. But I wanted to bring up this thing about broken color. It's not new, at all, it started with the impressionist movement (think Seurat, s'il vous plait), at least really got some legs and has been going strong as a way of getting color to work ever since. It's a relatively simple notion, a colors power depends on the color it's next to.  It's a way to get color to vibrate, to come to life. Lots of reproduction methods use this principle, off-set printing, your TV set, stone lithography, ummm the rhythm method. I did this little sunset 9x12 this week at the Winter Park paint out. Probably could have sold it more than once or twice. And that might be because it is a simple painting with color doing all the work. The trick is to juxtapose compliments, split-compliments and even analogous colors (sorry for the color theory speak, but, hey, it's color theory) to create an overall color field. The notes have to be near each other in value and saturation in order to get the subtle shimmering of light particles. This image is a little larger than I usually put up, so when you click on it you can see what I mean. It helped to paint this on a broad weave linen so that the color underneath can still show through and the chunks of paint come off the brush better. I like me some broad weave linen or is that linen weaving broads... they are fun to paint.