Lynsey Feilden

Author: lynseyfeilden

  • Starting with learning how primary colours work

    Starting with learning how primary colours work

    I have always known, in the way you know a fact without really knowing it, that you can make almost anything from red, yellow and blue. It is one of those things you are told quite early on in school art class but didn’t really understand it or never really practiced the art of mixing primaries. So today I did. I taped a sheet of oil paper to the table, squeezed out a cadmium yellow, a cadmium red, and a cobalt blue, and gave myself an afternoon to see what they were really capable of.

    The three tubes, well 4 including the Titanium White. The Michael Harding Cobalt Blue, Rowney Cadmium Yellow series E and Winsor and Newton Titanium White series 1 are rather old, bought when I first started learning about oil painting. The larger Winsor and Newton Alizarin Crimson is a recent buy to complete the three primary…

    The exercise

    The first column was straightforward enough. Crimson into cadmium, in different measures, walking from a deep pink through to orange and on to a colour that was practically a warm gold by the time white joined in. I could see the whole thing coming and mostly it behaved. But the moment I moved on to greens I understood why so many painted landscapes end up looking a bit municipal. Cadmium and cobalt on their own gave me something closer to khaki than any leaf I have ever stood under, and it took several goes, nudging the ratio one way and then the other, before I found a green with any life in it. Sixty percent cobalt to forty cadmium, roughly, was where it started to sing. Any more yellow and it went sickly. Any more blue and it went flat.

    The surprise of black

    The real surprise was the last column. I had always reached for a tube of black without giving it much thought, the way you reach for salt without measuring it. But mixing my own, from cobalt, crimson and a touch of cadmium, gave me something with far more depth than anything from a tube. There was a purple lurking in there, and a bottle green, and once I added white it came out lilac rather than grey. A black that is actually made of colour behaves quite differently from a black that is simply black, and it was only by mixing it myself, badly at first, that I understood why.

    Why this matters

    I know this is exactly the kind of exercise every painting book tells you to do in the first chapter, and I have skimmed past that chapter more than once over the years, always keen to get on with something that looked more like a painting. What I am learning, rather later than I would like, is that this is the painting. Or at least it is the part that everything else depends on. You cannot really see what you are doing with colour until you have stood in front of a palette and made the mistakes for yourself, watched a green go muddy and had to work out why, rather than simply reading that it might.

    I mentioned in my first post here that colour is relational, that a yellow changes depending on what sits beside it. Today’s exercise has given me the raw material to actually test that properly, now that I have a small library of mixes with notes on how I got there, rather than just a feeling I am chasing from memory each time.

    While I had paint on my hands I had the Louisiana Channel’s interview with David Hockney playing in the background, one of the last videos he did before passing away a few weeks ago. He makes the point that everything drawn or painted is an abstraction, however faithful it looks, because you are always translating a three-dimensional, moving, coloured world onto a flat surface using marks that are never quite the thing itself. I found that oddly reassuring while looking at nine little smears of paint that were meant to be a leaf. My green is not going to be the hedge outside my window. It was never going to be. It is my abstraction of it, built from three tubes of paint and an afternoon of getting it wrong, and that is rather the point of doing it by hand at all. He also talks in that same series about painting needing the hand, the eye and the heart together, and today felt like a fairly literal demonstration of that: the hand mixing, the eye judging, and a fair bit of heart required to keep going once the fourth green in a row still was not right. If you have half an hour, it is well worth watching in full: David Hockney interviewed by Louisiana Channel.

    Practical advice for beginners

    If you are starting out and colour feels like a mystery, as it did to me for a long time, my only real advice from today is this: buy three tubes, tape down a sheet of paper, and just mix. Write down your ratios as you go, because you will not remember them otherwise, and expect the first few to disappoint you. That disappointment is doing something useful. It is teaching you far more than a colour wheel ever could, and it is exactly where I said in my first post about learning to see colour that most of my real education has come from.

    Thank you for reading this one. I have a feeling I will be back at that palette again before the week is out.

  • Old Pages, Old Signs: Looking for Inspiration Off Pinterest

    Old Pages, Old Signs: Looking for Inspiration Off Pinterest

    I read a lot and I always have done and I think that reading these days has become rather more important than I realised it would be because it seems to be the one thing that stops my ideas from all looking rather the same as everyone else’s.

    You see it is tremendously easy nowadays to open Pinterest and type in whatever subject you happen to be working on and within a matter of moments you will have a hundred versions of precisely the same idea served back to you and it is all very efficient and practical but I have come to realise that it is rather a trap if I am being honest with you. When everyone is drawing from the same boards and the same trending searches and the same handful of accounts that everyone else is looking at then everything begins to look rather like everything else and that is not really what I want for my own work at all.

    So somewhere along the way I stopped starting there and instead I began going back to books and to the places where books live and second-hand bookstores especially have become rather special to me. There is something quite wonderful about a shop full of other people’s old paperbacks with their cracked spines and someone’s handwriting in the margins and perhaps a bus ticket used as a bookmark twenty years ago and Pinterest simply cannot give you that feeling at all. Nobody has already turned it into a mood board or filtered it through a thousand other people’s opinions. It is just sitting there waiting quietly to be noticed.

    I have also started to photograph old shop signs whenever I come across them and I find there is a whole history of craftsmanship sitting on the front of these buildings that nobody ever designed with a trend in mind. The hand-painted lettering and the slightly wonky kerning and the colours that have faded in a way that no filter could ever fake properly and quite often I do not even know what the shop used to sell but that does not really matter to me.

    This love of old things has taken me further into history generally and not just as a subject to know about but as an actual source of ideas and inspiration. Stories from decades or centuries ago and the way people dressed and wrote and the way they approached their problems without any of the tools we take for granted now and I find that far more interesting and far more honest than anything currently circulating on the internet.

    I do not think there is anything wrong with Pinterest if I am being fair but I have found that the more time I spend in second-hand bookshops and standing in front of old shop signs taking far too many photographs the more original my own work begins to feel and reading slows me down in much the same way. A good book does not hand you an idea all neatly formed and ready to use but rather it gives you a world to sit in for a while and I usually come out the other side of it with something I would not have found any other way at all.

    This is where I shall be sharing more of that and the books and the bookshops and the old signage and the bits of history that keep pulling at my attention. Thank you for reading this one.

  • Learning to See: What Painting Has Taught Me About Colour

    Learning to See: What Painting Has Taught Me About Colour

    I used to think I understood colour. I had studied art at college, at foundational level and also took a degree based design course. Entering the professional world my designs were never questioned for my use of colour so I thought I must of been ok. That was until one day when presenting a piece of work, a peer at the time absolutely bulldozed into me about my lack of understanding of colour. That day 15ish years ago hit hard and it still does. It’s not recently many years later that I have a bit of time to look at honing my use of colour.

    Staring at a screen for many years using colour screen is one thing. Colour mixed on a palette, responding to the light in a room, sitting next to another colour that changes how you perceive it – that’s something else entirely. My artwork has become the place where I’m slowly, sometimes frustratingly, learning to really see colour. This is where I see myself learning about colours.

    One of the biggest shifts has been learning that colour is relational. A yellow next to grey looks completely different from the same yellow next to purple. Value, how light or dark a colour is, often matters more than the hue itself. And temperature, whether a colour leans warm or cool, changes the whole mood of a piece before I’ve even settled on what I’m painting.

    I’ve also learned to slow down. Mixing the exact shade I’m after usually takes several attempts, and most of what I’ve learned has come from getting it wrong: a muddy mix, a colour that fights with everything around it, a painting that just doesn’t sit right until I figure out why. Each mistake has taught me something a colour wheel never could.

    The strange thing is, this has changed how I see the world outside the studio too. I notice the blue-grey of shadows on a wall, the way autumn light shifts everything warmer, colours I would have walked past a few years ago. That’s the part I didn’t expect: that learning to paint colour would change how I actually see.

    This blog will be where I share more of that process: the experiments, the mistakes, and what I’m learning along the way. Thanks for reading the first one.