Fugitive colors on Vincent van Gogh’s paintings

Vincent van Gogh, Bouquet of Irises, 1890, the background was lemon yellow.

I can’t help but wonder what this painting of Vincent van Gogh’s irises would have looked like when it was new, the yellow-green cast would not have been there and the blues would’ve been more intense. Perhaps even purple. His Bouquet of Irises against a Yellow Background (above) probably depicted purple irises, not blue ones. The yellow-green background to has shifted color and was probably closer to Naples yellow, as Vincent described it as a lemon yellow.

Irises painted May, 1889, at the St. Paul-de-Mausole asylum, in Arles, were once purple.

How much color degradation by photo-oxidation, or chemical reaction to varnishes added later has happened since this canvas was painted? Did Vincent use cadmium yellow or lead-based chrome yellow? Or yellow ochre? Zinc yellow favored by one of his contemporaries, Georges Seurat, too, is unstable. In other words the colors we see in La Grande Jatte are no longer true. They have shifted. 

The invention of new synthetic colors for textile dyes during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s coupled with the revolutionary invention of paint in a tube in the 1850s, directly led to the era of Modern Art. Not only had the painter’s palette, brightened considerably, painters were having a field day, literally, out painting in the fields, en plein aire. having forsaken the confines of the studio for the bucolic countryside. 

There was a major painting revolution going on. Artists were painting directly from life, not from smudged field notes and memory. Impressionism was in full swing, followed by Post-Impressionism. Color was king. No more drab chiaroscuro paintings. But artist also needed bold new colors that were more stable. There’s the rub.

What we are seeing now in many of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings—especially the yellows—is not what Vincent painted. Chrome-yellow turns brownish-green when exposed to sunlight. Ditto that with the reds and blue-purples. In his famous Bedroom at Arles painting and the many Irises paintings, Vincent used red lake with organic bug-based cochineal, and both were fugitive colors that either darkened, or faded to white. As it is, those white flowers in the field were once red poppies. And the brown buttercups were once yellow.

If we are to understand Vincent van Gogh’s palette choices, we need to know what pigments and binder mediums he used. And how they have changed colors with the passage of time. For example, linseed oil, the most-favored vehicle that binds pigments to the canvas, yellows and darkens with age. Too bad safflower (sunflower) oil wasn’t yet invented. For me, this is all sort of a hold my beer kind of epiphany. I need to recalibrate a long-standing notion of what I think of as Vincent‘s color palette.

It’s a good thing Vincent mixed cobalt blue pigment into his irises as well, otherwise we would be viewing a field of white irises. At least I think he used cobalt. He probably couldn’t have afforded lapis lazuli or ultramarine blue. There was a new synthetic ultramarine blue on the market, but it was terribly pricey. And surely he knew that azurite goes rogue and turns teal green or even black with age. 

Four quick paintings

Thinking my painting for the SGV Spring Art Show was due on Tax Day, and wanting to test run my newish Gamblin oil paints, I banged out four quick canvases sitting in my car. They were wet when I took the photos. Mt. St Helena from Sonoma Mountain is glistening, it's so wet. I haven't touched oil paints in 50 years, an allergy to turpentine made it impossible to breathe. Now there's Gamsol, a mineral oil opens up possibilities. Larry Rippe said no, you have two weeks. Reprieve. Sneaky Larry. I'm always late turning in my assignments.

My Maureen Hurley Art blog is now live

I've been developing a blog collection of my art work. I’ve still got a long way to go, with only 135 posts (some revert back to this writing blog—meaning I haven’t moved them over yet—mostly because I don’t have accessible jpgs). Blogger jpgs are tiny and you can’t directly lift them from an iPad. But you can lift low resolution jpgs from a laptop, by dragging them to the desktop.

Some posts host as many as ten art pieces, depending upon the medium. I tend to work in a series, or medium format: for example, a wet pastel jag, or an aquarelle jag, etc. I will eventually need to replace some poor jpgs—provided that I still have the work. In some cases, a bad jpg was all that survived. But it's a start.

Art is listed by media type, and by category. Most of my early work was destroyed, so in many cases, it comes down to bad jpgs (digital camera was in its infancy ca. 2000), or nothing at all. Work may seem uneven, but it really boiled down to what had survived the onslaught of technology, time and floods. Pretty much everything from my College of Marin and Sonoma State days was destroyed. Not to mention all my ceramics. Who knew that those daily Facebook Memories posts would yield so many salvageable jpgs, a snap to save to my iPad, then upload to the blog. It makes me positively giddy with joy.

At the bottom of the Blogger page there's a link to access the older posts, it goes in about 5 pages worth. Or you can navigate by month, which is much less useful as I don't know what month I made some  pieces, let alone, the year. Onward, as they say.

Next up is to create a photo blog. Any recommendations? I’ve been looking at many blogs for ideas. I really like Morrie Camhis (sp) photo blog. If only Blogger would develop some new templates. But as I write this, Blogger has finally updated the long in tooth app format. Meaning it’s a little easier to use it on the iPad. It was a nightmare, and there were no decent Blogger apps in the App Store.

Maureen Hurley Art blog 

https://mohurleyart.blogspot.com

Elephant Mountain, 4 views (tempera paintings)