Green

The past two weeks have been partly involved practice in mixing greens--oil colors of course. If you're going to paint outside in summer, understanding and mixing green is an obvious necessity. Green in it's thousands of tints and shades, cools and warms, and differing base values is incredibly varied, in nature. When I was a beginner, it seemed to me that you ought to be able to buy a few tubes of green paint and then lighten them with white and darken them with black and that would suffice when painting the countryside. Of course I was wrong. That strategy produces lighter and darker values but there is considerably more to green than dark and light. Hence the need to practice color mixing.

Claude Monet, "Highway Bridge, Argenteuil," 1874

Although blue is the most popular color, green is second most popular among men in the United States and much of the rest of the world, too. For U.S. women, purple is second, but green is third. In short, we love green almost as much as blue. Green is restful, symbolic of youth, fertility, life, hope, and wealth. The color green not surprisingly nourishes many of us. Considering the popularity of blue and green, some speculate that we like those colors so much because they appeal to deeply primitive memories of clear skies, lush vegetation and blue water. Perhaps so. Certainly landscape painters benefit from the popularity of both colors. In his plein air painting of the Highway Bridge at Argenteuil (above) Claude Monet clearly understood the value of both colors, plus that single bright red at the far end of the bridge, made brighter by the dullness of the tree foliage on the far bank.

On the painter's color wheel green is between blue and yellow (orange is between yellow and red, and violet between red and blue), and results from mixes of blues and yellows. But greens aren't all mixed colors. Green pigments have been available to artists for centuries in minerals containing copper (malachite, verdigris) and chromium (viridian), and as various green earths, among many others. Ancient Egypt used malachite green but Ancient Greece didn't use greens at all, relying on only four basic colors of yellow, red, black, white. Romans, on the other hand, revered green as symbolic of Venus and fecundity and used a kind of green earth for their pigment. Today we have quite a few earth greens but also synthetic pigments--cadmium green for example.

Green in all its variety has become more common in paintings since the early 19th

John Constable, "The Hay Wain," oil, 1821

century. Looking at landscapes from the turn of the 19th century shows that the greens in use were dull and often relatively dark since most colors were earths. People like John Constable (1776-1837) did produce beautiful landscapes while painting outdoors, though greens were dull. More vivid greens arrived in the last few decades of the 19th century, making possible the brighter colors of impressionist works, but also were important in the post-impressionist oeuvre. It is hard to imagine van Gogh without bright greens.

van Gogh, "Self Portrait Dedicated to Gauguin," 1888

Hoff, "Outside at Last," oil, 2019

In my own practice you could say I show an aversion to green--most of my landscape work is actually cityscapes, for example. But actually, a recent foray into outdoor painting has awakened my interest in green. My first outdoor work after being away was, strictly speaking, a still life and not a landscape. But in my defense, the painting was done outdoors and the subject was living plants. I painted two house plants that had been moved out to a shady spot only a few days earlier. The interesting thing about this painting was the greens and yellows. The greens range from bright yellow-greens to dark and cool blue-greens banding the house plant leaves, with color temperatures and values ranging widely between the two extremes. Mixing all of those different greens was the biggest challenge of the work. Notably, there is almost no red in the painting, which is dominated by green and blue.















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