Burnout

It’s the dreaded “artist block.” It’s lack of inspiration, motivation, revelation, or whatever else you want to call it. I call it 2020. The year when everything turned into a dumpster fire, and I actually wound up with plenty of time on my hands to paint… and didn’t, not like I should have. Sure, I made a few things and painted a little here and there, but I didn’t really produce work, and I didn’t do anything with the work I did produce other than a few Instagram posts. My artist CV will just be skipping over 2020 like it never happened (Wouldn’t that be nice.) I sold less than 5 paintings all year, hardly enough to constitute a small business, and at this point it’s more of a stressful burden. It’s not just the painting, it’s the need to also focus on marketing, accounting, taxes, and trying not to completely abandon it all in the wake of a time-consuming (pre-covid, anyway) full time job.

Ten years of endless compliments mixed with lack of sales or interest (and losing hundreds of Instagram followers in 2020) just leads me to paint smaller, be cheaper, and try harder to make better paintings, to the point where I lower prices too far, second guess everything I make, and come to the conclusion that everything looks awful and I must be incapable of selling anything. If a normal post gets a good amount of interaction and likes, a post that mentions it’s for sale, or that something is on sale gets crickets. That frustration just makes the studio pile up in not-quite-finished paintings and projects and fewer and fewer attempts at marketing myself. As an artist, you forget the pieces that you do sell, simply because they are gone, but you are constantly reminded of the number of paintings you don’t sell, because you are surrounded by these “failures” that have been sitting there for years. Why should I take the time to make my ideas come to life, when they will just sit on my shelf, possibly forever. It creates a level of resentment and hopelessness that makes it almost impossible to finish a piece and put it out there to be mostly ignored, but that’s probably just anxiety talking.

I wish this post had a solution to this problem, a “here’s how I got over the burnout” quick fix, an inspirational call to action to keep pushing through and the sales and commissions will come, or an exercise to help someone else just be content with creating and stop worrying about all the hassles that come with it. Maybe in a year or five, I can follow up with this post and see how everything worked out perfectly, or I’ll just become another person that used to paint but hasn’t had time or effort for it in years. I guess we will see, but meanwhile, I will just keep painting, and stressing, and praying.

Ode to Black Paints

I, like many art students, was told to never use black paint.  My painting professor in college endlessly encouraged me to use what is called an optical black.  An example of an optical black would be to substitute a deep violet or a dark green or any other highly saturated but dark in value in order to give the illusion of black while creating a more dynamic color palette.  If your painting calls for a deep black area, an art student might be taught to use a chromatic black, a very deep color made from two or more paint colors to essentially make your own black.  It’s great advice, and I followed it then, and I often follow that advice even now, almost eight years after earning my BFA.  I understand why that is the lesson that art students need to learn, and why artists should learn not to lean on black pigments for creating value in a painting.

But heres my problem: I LOVE THE COLOR BLACK.  I also love a good, super neutral gray (another color that is not encouraged in art lessons).  My truck: black.  My phone: black. The quilt on my bed: black.  The deep pit that is my soul: black.  Most things I buy: black if possible.  It’s not an emo thing, and it’s not in any attempt at being badass in any way.  The simplicity and neutrality and strength are what appeals to me in relation to blacks and dark grays.  

There is much subtlety in different pigments used to create black paints.  For example Ivory Black, which is thankfully not made from ivory waste anymore, is opaque and strong and tends to shift toward brown when mixed with other colors.  Lamp Black, now sometimes called Carbon Black since the pigment is made with carbon is my favorite black to use; it can be one of the more transparent black pigments and will shift more blue when mixed with other colors.  The last popular black is Mars Black.  Mars black is made from a synthetic pigment and is the most neutral black; it dries fast and opaque, and can even be slightly magnetic (I was a bit confused one day when I found a magnet stuck to a tube of Mars black paint that was in a plastic tube).  

I believe that it is important to learn to paint without needing to use black pigments to achieve a wide range of subtle colors, but I also find black useful in my work when mixing certain colors.  One of my favorite colors to mix is a nice, deep plum color created by mixing black with cadmium red.  The best way to mix a good olive green color is simply by mixing black (usually carbon black) with a cadmium yellow hue; this is a color combination that may artists find by mistake when trying to add black pigment to create a darker yellow.  Almost all blue pigments tend to be very strong and can overpower your palette easily, but by mixing a strong, deep, highly saturated pthalo blue with a simple combination of your favorite black and your favorite white, you can make a huge range of muted soft blues which can then be more easily tinted into something else or used as a good gray without running the risk of shifting too far toward brown (one of my pet peeves when mixing my own gray using complimentary colors).

Black is a lot more prevalent in much of the art I see now, so I feel it might be losing it’s place as the taboo pigment on a palette; or maybe breaking the rules is just in the nature of many artists. Don’t discount black pigments just because it is what you have been taught.  I advise that you take the time to learn the difference in the different kinds of blacks and use them wisely to serve your purposes.  I’m a huge proponent of limiting your palette and choosing colors sparingly, and sometimes the best choice for a painting is a saturated bright color, but sometimes I feel like the best choice is just plain old black.

The Benefits of a Limited Palette

There’s a little piece of advice that has stuck with me since I was young and going to all the summer art day camps I could in junior high.  I don’t remember where I heard it or who I heard it from, but someone somewhere said something resembling, “Art is not interesting because of what’s in it but because of what’s not.”  Odds are that’s not even what was said, but now, years and years later, that's what I remember.  If anyone has heard it before and knows where or who it is originally from, please let me know!

I stick by this quote in my work mostly in regards to color.  Everyone has different tastes, but I am always drawn to color palettes that do not contain every color in the rainbow.  By limiting your color options, every color chosen for a piece becomes more deliberate and thought out.  In abstract art, color is everything, and the way they interact within the composition can make or break a piece.  Here is an example.  The piece on the left is a painting I did in college.  Whatever I knew about limiting my palette took a vacation, and in trying and trying to finish it, I just kept adding bright colors and more bright, fullly saturated colors.  I was left with this painting I never liked.  However, the piece on the right is another one I did my senior year at TCU, and it’s one of only a few I have kept from my BFA days.  Composition differences between them aside, the one on the right is heavy in blues and greens and has areas of different levels of tone and saturation within that.  It has other areas of browns and rust colors and pinks which offset the blues and greens, keeping the piece very colorful, but still limited to a definitive color palette. 

As in every “official art rule,”  there are always exceptions and ways to successfully break this rule, but in my experience, this mindset of limiting yourself from the beginning of a piece makes is easier to make informed and purposeful decisions about color.  

There are two ways to utilize the concept of limited palette.  The traditional approach in oil painting is to limit the colors of paint you put on the physical paint palette where you are actually mixing the colors to be used in the painting.  This forces you to mix colors, and by not having so many types of pigments to fall back on, you focus more on the subtleties of tone and color temperature in the paint you apply to the canvas.  The second approach, which I focus, on is limiting the colors that will be visible in the finished piece.  I like to lay out a few ground rules for myself when I begin each piece, such as this piece will have no yellow shades of green and no oranges, and all blues will be muted and on the red/purple end of the spectrum.  That simple thought process still leaves me with many colors and combinations to choose from, and immediately gives me something to respond to aesthetically, preventing the age-old dilemma of a blank canvas.

Anders Zorn (1860-1920) was a Swedish painter known for his use of a limited palette.  Most of the time, he only used these four colors: Lead White (Flake White), Yellow Ochre, Vermilion, and Ivory Black.  He was a portrait painter, and these pigments served him well.  His choice of black pigment was specially significant because ivory black has blue tones to it; so he was able to make a whole range of flesh tones from pale pinks to deep browns with the ability to have cool blue-greys and olive greens to balance it out.  It is a very challenging palette to stick with these days when we can run to the nearest art store and find an overwhelming amount of pre-mixed colors, but the spectrum created by his special palette is beautiful.  In Zorn’s self portrait to the left, you can see the colors on his palette. And while he is famous for his palette, he was also known to use other colors of paint on occasion when the subject matter or individual piece called for it. 

Mark Rothko (1903-1970), an American Abstract Expressionist painter is most known for his paintings with big freeform rectangles of color contrasting with or contemplating other large areas of color on the piece.  They are a prime example of using a limited palette with the end result in mind.  Each piece, including the minimalist black paintings hanging in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, have a very deliberate and pre-planned color palette that was obviously conceived before the painting was begun.  They are a great demonstration of how colors can play against each other and how the ratio of large amounts of one color to smaller amounts of others can affect their perception.

Next time you look at a piece from art history or a post from your Instagram feed, ignore the content for a few minutes and take the time to really look at just the colors and pigments used, and note the colors that are not there and why it was a good decision to leave them out.  Van Gough's Starry Night has a very specific blue, yellow, and black color palette while Monet's The Houses of Parliament has a palette that includes pinks, oranges, yellows, and blues that are all muted and pastel.  Contemporary photographers who have access to technology that can produce photos with bright vivid colors will still often choose black and white, limiting the palette of the image to draw the viewer's attention to tone and subject matter.  Instagram filters take the pictures from your phone and change their palette, shifting it towards the cooler or warmer end of the color spectrum.  The concept of limited palette is seen in practice everywhere, and most artists practice it, whether they are aware of it or not. Next time you start a piece, give some forethought to the color palette you want to use.  And next time you are stuck on a piece, think what color should I take out, rather than thinking what color should I add?  When you find yourself in the paint aisle being overwhelmed by all the long names like phthalocyanine or quinacridone and multitudes of types of pigments that look all the same on a label, take a deep breath and rule them out instead of convincing yourself you need ALL THE COLORS! (Unless it just really pretty. Then buy it anyway, and use it wisely and with as few other colors as possible so that it won't get buried.)

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