Autumn Chair. I am sure there is a point in even the most loving relationship when one partner moves into the garden shed. I spend quite a lot of time in mine – painting of course – not sulking! I love painting this chair at all times of the year but I am particularly fond of autumn shadows. There is a vast range of warm dark colours available – please make the most of them. The colours in this large (for me) picture are a balance of complementaries chosen from a range of orange-reds, blue-greens and pink-violets.

Taken from the first of a 1994 series in Leisure Painter, Charmian Edgerton solves a few important problems for the pastellist beginning with the colour of the shadows.

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A history of painting shadows

In France, around 1840, quantities of brown and black pigment must have lain abandoned and rejected in the dim emporias of the artists’ suppliers. How those ‘colour men’ must have grumbled about that “physicist Chevreul and his new-fangled ideas”. Because overnight (it seems) a world of brown shadows changed to blue and violet.

The ‘Art of Darkness’ gave way to a sense of sky. In the hands and paint brushes of surprisingly few young men a scientific and artistic revolution took place that has inspired artists, amateur and professional alike, for the last 150 years.

Impressionism, i.e. the breaking down of colour, has had the greatest influence on art since the Renaissance.

However, it is fascinating to discover in art history, how Valasquez (1599-1660) and Rembrandt (1606-1669) and, most importantly for us pastellists, Chardin (1699-1779), previewed by a century or two the important break-away from academic realism. They, for the first time, emphasised the ‘broken paintbrush stroke’, the evocative ‘blurred edge’ and the creation of form by light and atmospheric colour.

That master of chiaroscuro, Rembrandt, is supposed to have said: “It does not matter what colour the light is, as long as the shadows are painted in the colour corresponding to each light”.

Summer Shadows. Shadows can lend pattern as well as colour to a painting. This picture, though it is created almost entirely by shadow, is really all about light. But without the shadow it would be quite boring! Take note of the shadow’s colours; as a complement to the green hanging basket there is quite a lot of violet and purple chalk dotted in to the cerulean/cobalt/turquoise blue of the shadow. Strokes of viridian and leaf green reflect the ‘local’ colour of the leaves.

Chardin, following this innovatory advice nearly a century later, did just that. Using parallel hatchings of pastel strokes he modelled and rendered light and form with impressionistic dots and dashes of local and complementary colour.

In later years, as his sight failed, he used his pastels like an oil painter. Glazing layer upon layer of gleaming pigment, he boldly reflected colour into light and dark areas across the whole picture plane.

Chardin’s use of a chalk ‘impasto’ to reflect light and create atmosphere foreshadowed, of course, the work of the greatest pastel painter of our time, Edgar Degas (1832 -1917), Signac and Seurat, the post-Impressionist Pointillists, took ‘the broken brush stroke’, i.e. the dots and dashes, through intense scientific analysis to artistic extremes.

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Colour theory

Larder Shadows (Garlics and Wooden Spoons). I love painting the things in my larder, and I have to admit to doing more painting than cooking. Indeed I had to rescue these garlic bulbs from my hungry husband!” My eye was caught by the light and shadows spilling over the wooden spoons. Hmm, I thought, that looks different. As the shadow travelled across different surfaces it changed very subtly, in colour and in depth. Again, note the colours; I used a lot of complementary orange and blue.

The ‘Art of Darkness’, i.e. the darker the shadows, the more ‘real the picture’, stretched its tentacle grip over many 18th century drawing rooms and, in the 19th century, drawing masters preached its doctrine with a near religious fervour in overstuffed Victorian parlours.

Miraculously surviving every art movement of this century, ‘brown gravy’, as I believe Turner called it, is still alive and well and lying at oblique angles across too many drawing boards in too many art clubs, societies and schools.

I sometimes feel, when faced with yet another painting of the ‘brown jug and shadow’ genre, that Chevreul and the Impressionists never existed and that I would like to ban for ever all black and brown pigment.

Reading through the above paragraphs, I wonder how many painters, myself included, are feeling a twinge of guilt. It is so easy, isn’t it, if you are painting a brown jug to mix in a little black to the appropriate shadow? If you start doing this, STOP. You are on the road to a disaster. Have a cup of tea and glance through a simple book on colour theory.

There are some excellent books around and one I can particularly recommend is Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green, by Michael Willcox. I don’t want to rabbit on about colour theory; Mr Willcox does it much better. Skim through his book and read it thoroughly later, as I am presuming that you already have a rudimentary knowledge of primary and complementary colours and that you are familiar with the words ‘local’, ‘tonal’ and ‘atmospheric colour’.

Shady Geraniums. I don’t know about you, but I love geraniums. They are so good tempered to paint, never wilting or dropping petals at crucial moments! Take a close look at these flower pots; their ‘local colour’ is rich with ‘tonal colour’ and ‘atmospheric colour’, i.e. while they are in shadow they are absorbing and reflecting the bright complementary light of the sunlit flagstones.

However, to refresh your memory, ‘local’ colour is what we call the colour of an object; its ‘real colour’, e.g. the metaphorical brown jug is ‘brown’. ‘Tonal’ colour is our brown jug when its ‘brown-ness’ is affected by light and shadow. ‘Atmospheric colour’ is when the brown jug absorbs and reflects the local colour of surrounding objects, e.g. the flowers in the jug, the background, the foreground and the surface on which it stands.

Our simple little brown jug then is surrounded by a complexity of issues, but definitely no brown or black shadows. Shadows are quite simply areas where there is less light and where there is less light, there is less colour – the colour is less intense. Shadow is the cool companion to warm, bright light, as every colour wheel explains.

Still Life with Michaelmas Daisies. Having raided the larder again for this still life, I set the jug and flowers ‘contre jour’ – against the light. In this case, a spotlight. I was delighted with the resulting patterns. Looking nearly black against the rim of light, I was pleased with the way the brown jug reflected and absorbed the complementary purple shadows.

Exciting mix

“I see the colour blue in all shadows,” said Vincent van Gogh.

All shadows do contain blue (they reflect the sky) but they also contain a powerful cocktail of colours both complementary and local to the object.

To make our paintings come alive we must capture this exciting mix on our canvas, board or paper.

A good reproduction of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte is a must for would-be pastellists to explore with a magnifying glass. It is as inspirational now as it obviously was in 1866. To quote Felix Feneon: “Take the shady lawn; most of the strokes are in the specific tint of the grass; other orange ones are sprinkled here and there …. other strokes bring in green’s complementary colour, purple.”

Now, look at the black dog. He is, I think, visually very important. To quote Feneon again: “Since black is the absence of light, the dog absorbs the colours reflected by the grass; its dominant colour is therefore dark purple, but it is also ‘attacked’ by a dark blue reflected from the neighbouring regions.”

Buttercups and Willowherb. I always enjoy painting wild flowers, but feel very guilty about picking them. However, I had no qualms about picking these. They are rescued from the mower in our local park. In this little painting, I deliberately emphasised the turquoise in the centre of the buttercups to complement the red-violet of the willowherb. My shadow is rich with warm ‘local’ colour which complements the green of the cloth. If you glance at the detail you will see that the right hand side of the pot is affected by ‘tonal colour’.

Exciting stuff, eh? Pastellists and, of course, painters in other media, can learn a lot from the pointillists, but I always feel that we pastellists should have a soft spot for Seurat and Signac. We have to use our chalks in a similar ‘spotty’ way, dotting and dashing our optical mixture of colours across the support to create (hopefully) luminous areas of light and shadow.

Detail from right hand side of pot in Buttercups and Willowherb

I hope that you have a little brown jug at home, and that you will look at it with new eyes. Because the secret of its shadows is not in reading this article, throwing your black and brown chalks, paints etc. in the dustbin or pouring over a postcard of Seurat. The secret doesn’t lie in tubes, chalks and brushes or endless exercises with the colour wheel.

The secret and its solution lies with you. If you can learn not just to see, but to look, look and look again, all your shadows will turn, I promise you, into rainbows!


Further reading from this series:

Click here to read part 2 of Charmian Edgerton's Pastel Solutions

Click here to read part 3 of Charmian Edgerton's Pastel Solutions

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