Margret E Short Fine Arts Blog

Sienna Shadows

Here is a perfect example of a good use of burnt sienna. The bright (illuminated) side of the rug in painting #4 is painted using vermilion mixed with combinations of naples yellow, lead-tin yellow, and white. Then as the light fades away (to the right side) I have used variations of madder and  burnt sienna to give the feeling of depth. There also are touches of cool tones where I have used blues and greens to give more contrast. I am constantly talking to myself as I paint, "think contrasts, light/dark and cool/warm and smooth/textured and so forth." This is what makes a painting interesting with variations of all the components, like magical illusions on a flat surface. An added benefit is the quick drying time.

Tulips 101

One of my blog readers wrote a wonderful and informative comment on the post The Tears of Fernad. She is an avid gardener filled with terrific ideas about how to care for tulips as a cut flower. According to her, they are the only flower that continues to grow after they are cut. To read more of her clever ideas, click on the "comment 1" in the Fernad post below. Thanks Mimi. I will use your ideas for longer lasting subject matter while painting those irresistible flowers!

The Tears of Fernad

Most of us have a big misconception about tulips and their origin. Most of us know they came from Holland. Well, the truth is that Holland has made tulips famous, but they did not originate there.

Now, in my sensibility, this is the most splendid and delightful flower to put on canvas. The colors and varieties are endlessly breathtakingly lovely and interesting. There are solids, stripes, doubles, singles, ruffled, small large, pale, bright, spiky, smooth, tall, short, and all in between every descriptive adjective mentioned here and more.

In actuality, the tulip originated in Turkey then to Holland in the 16th century. For many hundreds of years prior, the flower was loved and revered by people who lived on the slopes of the Pamirs and the foothills and valleys of the Tien Shan Mountains where Tibet and China meet Russia and Afghanistan. Mike Dash describes the tulip's journey in his irresistible story Tulipomania which has become one of my favorite reference books.

It is filled with facts, legends, and includes both Ottoman and Dutch history. One such legend is the story of a prince named Fernad who was deeply in love with a maiden, Shirin. "One day word reached Fernad (falsely, as it turned out) that his beloved had been killed. Gripped by unbearable grief, he hacked his own body open with an ax. Blood dripping from his terrible wounds fell onto the barren soil, and from each drop a scarlet flower sprang, a symbol of his perfect love." In Persia for hundreds of years, wild red tulips remained a symbol of undying love.

During the heyday of the Tulip Mania in 16th and early 17th century Holland, the favored flowers were streaked (flamed). These stripes were actually caused by a virus in the bulb, but today's breeders have replicated the unusual characteristics in virus-free bulbs.

Even though I love flowers, especially tulips, I am not much of gardener (would much rather paint). We are extremely fortunate here in the Willamette Valley in Oregon to have excellent tulip growing conditions. Each year in early spring Dave and I visit the Wooden Shoe Tulip Gardens in nearby Woodburn for armloads of bouquets to both paint fresh and photograph for future paintings. As many of you know, this is one of my favorite subjects, and favorites in the galleries also. We are also fortunate the Persians shared and spread their beloved flowers to the rest of the world for all to enjoy.

And More!

And more uses for those siennas. Raw sienna used here, mixed with white, lead-tin yellow, and black makes great variations of tones for this application. Painting #9 detail.

Geology Burnt Sienna, 101

Burnt sienna, also known as Caledonian brown and terra di Siena, comes in a variety of shades, depending on its source. It gets its rich dark brown coffee color from a heating process.

In order to get burnt sienna, you must first heat raw sienna in a process called calcination which removes the water from the clay and turns it from a yellowish to a red color. According to wikipedia, calcination in a thermal treatment process applied to ores and other solid materials in order to bring about a thermal decomposition, phase transition, or removal of a volatile fraction. The Dutch were famous for this technique and made a rich earthy color they marketed as English Red.

One of the earliest known pigments, it has excellent drying and glazing qualities. I find it useful for wood tones, the less lighted side of red objects, fabrics, to warm blacks (and speed up the drying time too) and many other applications. It also has a very pronounced tooth.

Kurt Wehlte states in his book, The Materials and Techniques of Painting, "when stored for long periods, powder pigments sometimes increase their color saturation by continued oxidation." Saturation is the intensity of a color and is a critical component of a pigment for an artist. Many colors/hues have what is known as a "low tinting power" or a "high tinting power" meaning it takes a little or a lot of paint to achieve the desired color.

So, what Wehlte is saying is over time powdered pigments can become more intense. I certainly found this true recently, quite by accident. While gathering thoughts and doing research for this project, I recalled I had a few pigments in storage from many many years ago, perhaps 20 or 25. One of the pigments suitable was burnt sienna, stored in a tin all these years.

After making some paint, and using it in a painting, I wondered why it was so intense. Now, after stumbling on this research information in the Wehlte book, I know why. Continued oxidation! Whodathunkit?

Geology Raw Sienna, 101

Limonite clay is a main ingredient in the pigment family called sienna. Raw sienna is described as a dull brownish yellow, which in spite of its dullness, is very versatile and widely used by artists. I have used it for the shady side of yellow objects, in backgrounds, and even fleshtones. It also is a perfect color, used alone, as a shadow tone for white objects such as sheet music, pages of books, and white textiles and fabrics.

Even after a painstaking effort of levigation (separating the particle sizes with water) the siennas retain a very desirable toothy texture. Raw sienna is lightfast, transparent which makes it a splendid glazing color. Another very important characteristic is the excellent drying time.

Raw sienna has a very high oil absorption, up to 100%, thus will darken considerably after grinding into a paint, as you can see here. According to Kurt Wehlte in The Materials and Techniques of Painting, "sienna is one of the ancient pigments whose appearance and durability has never been matched, let alone surpassed, by modern industrial products.

The Sun, the Moon, and Burnt Sienna

Burnt Sienna is an extraordinarily versatile and useful pigment. In use since antiquity, the siennas sometimes are grouped into the "brown" category, but they are far from plain old brown. With their iron oxide ingredients, they range from rich earthy reds to foreboding darks.

In earlier times, sienna was found in Siena, Italy and was known as terra di Siena, "earth of Siena." During the 1940s these mines were depleted, and nowadays the pigment deposits are found places such as Sardinia, Sicily, and the Appalachians.

Some of the mines date from the Precambrian period, roughly 4500 million years ago. Even though 7/8s of the Earth's history dates from this time, not much is known. It is thought that the earth was smothered in gases without oxygen for hundreds of millions of years. Oxygen was produced when evolving life forms developed photosynthesis.

The chemical reactions between iron and oxygen occurred until the supply of oxidizable surfaces were depleted. It was then that our modern high oxygen atmosphere began to develop. Rocks formed during this time contain massive bands of iron formations, and were laid down as iron and oxygen first combined. Thus came the sienna pigments, high in iron oxides, also known as ferric oxide.   

During my research, I found this theory. About 4500 million years ago, "it is thought that the Earth itself coalesced from material in orbit around the sun and may have been struck by a very large (Mars-sized) planetesimal shortly after it formed, splitting off material that came together to form the moon."

Source: wikipedia

In other words, these are truly historic pigments!

From Here to Modernity

Once upon a time, I thought a "podcast" was a clay mockup for a flower sculpture. Nowadays, it is known as a high tech method of posting and listening to a particular discussion or interview on the Internet.

Alyson Stanfield, my consultant, launched me from the Golden to the Modern Age practically overnight. Not only has Alyson counseled many artists, she also has several years of museum experience. Hence, she fully understands how right brainers have to be yanked "kicking and screaming" into today's technological world. I, for one, could never have done any of this without her skilled guidance.

Alyson graciously invited me to be her first subject for a "podcast" interview. She asked me to describe my blogging experience, and the relationship to my Lessons from the Low Countries project.

I invite you to listen to the full 8 minute 43 second interview at Alison's site www.artbizblog.com (.MP3 file) and read the March 5, 2007 Main Article: Focus Your Blog.

More Testing

As expected, black was painfully slow to dry. In this test, we included:

• bone black (4 days)
• bone black slightly gritty (8 days with very apparent tack)
• black Roman earth (4 days with some tack)

The drying times of the specialty colors:

• vermilion - 21 hours- but color rubs off slightly
• azurite - 22 hours
• lapis - 44 hours
• minium - 44 hours

Eight green earths were tested and found to have wildly different drying times. Celadonite was the slowest of all the tested colors, including the blacks.

The careful record keeping and precise testing was splendidly beneficial. After review of the results, I have eliminated many colors and now have 16 reasonably fast drying pigments plus white for my palette. I now use: 1 each, green earth, red, blue, blue/green, red.orange, 2 umbers, 4 ochres, 4 siennas, and 1 black. Sometimes I sneak in a little lead-tin-yellow and a few lakes which beautifully round out all that is necessary.

This simple limited palette is remarkably varied. I can achieve an endless range of bright, subtle, dark, light and neutral tones.

Testing, Testing

The past two weeks have been filled with pigment tests. It is easy to see that certain colors take much longer to dry than others. I have consistently taken note of this during the actual painting process of the past many weeks. Waiting for a passage to dry sufficiently to apply the next layer can become very frustrating if prolonged.

This can happen especially in the rainy winter climate in the Northwest. Placing a wet painting near (but not on) a furnace vent will expedite things. This is a trick I employ often.

My drying chart tests were both revealing and surprising. First, Nancy made swatches of all the project colors in use thus far; 33 in all. She used a canvas pad as the surface and linseed oil as the sole medium, attempting all the while to get a uniform paint thickness.

Several pigment groups had more than one color from several different suppliers. An example of this is the yellow ochre category:

Lemon ochre (Rublev), yellow ochre extra pale Cyprus (Sinopia), yellow ochre clear France (Kremer). These colors all vary in hue and opacity slightly, ranging from a rich yellow to an an orangish or dull gold tone. The time was recorded carefully as each swatch was finished. The next step was to simply wait and test the dryness in 12 hour intervals.

It is commonly known that certain colors are excellent driers and some very slow. Umbers, siennas, ochres, generally dry quickly and blacks are notoriously slow, but my results were pretty shocking. The range of drying time in a specific hue category varied enormously. 

We tested four siennas. We expected them all to dry in approximately the same amount of time. But this was not the case at all. They dried anywhere from 23, 45, 62, and 67 hours, a huge difference. We discovered similar results in the ochre and umber categories. Many other colors were found to be dry to the touch but retained a slight tack after as many as 5 days.

On to the blacks, green earths,  and specialty colors next, with final results.