An Interview with Frank on Color: Use and Choice
excerpt from L’Art de l’Aquarelle no.5 article from 2009
List your standard palette of colors, including brands.
My palette includes no earth colors and generally favors the most transparent paints. I use American Journey paint which is available in 37 ml size tubes. My blues include: phthao, ultramarine and cerulean. My reds include: alizarin crimson, permanent rose and opera. My greens include viridian, Hooker’s green, dark and phthalo green. My yellows: Qinacridone yellow, plus a warm bright yellow and a cool bright yellow of any brand made with arylide. Thus all three of my yellows are transparent. I use as a dark orange, burnt orange qinacridone. I use Payne’s gray to darken any of my cool brights when I do not wish to change their hue. I mix my bright oranges where needed.
2. Does your choice of color include both transparent and more opaque watercolors? Is this an important issue for you or not?
I am not interested in opaque paint as such but enjoy the use of cerulean blue. Although it is opaque, I welcome its granulating properties along with ultramarine and viridian. Having worked as an illustrator, I am well practiced in opaque media, but I find now that art thrives on limitations rather than extensions..
3. Do you include any other medium in your watercolors? Eg. Gauche, acyclique?
I include no other solvent or medium with my paint and use few, if any gimmicks to produce paint texture. I limit myself to purest, transparent procedures although I appreciate great work by others that include such.
4. Does you choice of color vary depending on the subject that you have chosen to paint? If yes state how and why.
I give very little attention to local color, and often give short shrift to local tonal values as well. Although I always plan tonal values and shapes on a small sketch before painting, my color comes intuitively. I agree with Van Gogh who said that “My color comes from the palette and not obsequiously from nature”.
This attitude toward color is consistent with my overall approach. Although my paintings always start with nature, I make my own shapes, tonal values, sizes and color.
5. Does your color choice vary depending on the atmosphere that you wish to achieve in your painting? If yes state how and why.
I seldom try to paint atmosphere and clouds. My distant shapes are often handled as simple combinations of close valued shapes. I marvel at how Cezanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire is treated similar to up-close shapes and yet is 40 miles away.
6. Please talk about your idea of color use/color theory (use of complementries, off-the-hip choices, use of 3 primaries theories etc.)
Since my art school days I have studied color theory and have done countless experiments, but I never have held a color scheme in my left hand as I paint with the right hand. I think the mind has to be furnished with theory just as perspective needs to be known so that we may freely embrace or eschew under the immediacy of production.
7. Please talk about ANY other aspects of color treatment that you feel are important to your work.
Color is the daily bread of the eyes. When one says, “Painting” one says, “Color”. Perhaps the art student is so enchanted by his/her palette that the foundations of shape and tonal values are ignored. The most important qualitiesfor the painter to seek is composition and expression. For the master, color is part of that quest.
Frank Webb