Paint Dark

Watercolor Painting

he watercolors of Texas artist Dan Burt are radiant, animated mosaics built up from slashes, drips, and strokes of transparent paint. They remind you of the way light dances through stained-glass windows. His style is part California school and part Old World Mexico, with a dash of sun-splashed Texas Hill Country. But his harmonies and contrasts are his own.

Burt says of his use of color, “I try to achieve some kind of a conflict in the color–to create interest. For me that’s the only purpose of color in a painting.” For this reason, his hues don’t depend on the local source. They come from his memory, imagination, and intuition, and they’re always subservient to whatever value scheme he has in mind.

An ardent colorist, Burt doesn’t use tube blacks, grays, or earth colors. Along with the tube colors he does use, which he puts on a Robert E. Wood palette, he makes up trays with puddles of unmixed, dissolved colors, replenishing them as needed. There’s a system to his puddles: He uses four trays of color (the tops and bottoms of two John Pike palettes). The puddles on the first tray are made up of both transparent and granulating colors, among them viridian, cobalt blue, aureolin, and permanent rose. In the early stages of a painting, he uses these pigments for light-to-middle-value, broken-color washes, letting the colors mix on the paper.

On the second tray are puddles of darker, mostly staining colors, including ultramarine blue, new gamboge, Winsor yellow, Winsor green, and alizarin crimson. These are for the middle and dark tones applied in a painting’s later stages. On the third tray, Burt repeats some puddles from the second: alizarin crimson and Winsor yellow, for instance, plus he adds other colors, such as Winsor green. He might mix one puddle with another or spice up one with tube color for surprise combinations and accents.

The fourth tray holds puddles of opera pink, scarlet lake, and cadmium yellow. He likes to use these colors, and their complements, in and around the focal point of the painting in its early stages for what he calls “shock effects.”

Burt uses sable brushes because, he says, they hold more water (and therefore pigment) than do synthetic brushes–an important consideration for his wet-in-wet style. He especially likes large sable rounds (Nos. 9 and 12) and sable flats (1″ and 1 1/21).

Burt uses the same approach for all his paintings, whether of a Mexican church or a Gulf Coast shrimp boat. In his Kerrville studio, sunlight from a patio window streams in over his left shoulder and Aaron Copland music surges forth from a radio. The artist stands over a full sheet of cold-pressed, 140-pound paper that’s propped up on his easel at a height not far above his knees. His subject–already captured on the paper in minimal, spidery graphite lines–is the Mediterranean-looking facade of a San Antonio apartment building.

Clutching his large sable brushes, he works with his fourth tray of shocking” colors and their complements in and around the center of interest in light values, wet against dry, and with the first tray of paints, laying in the painting’s lightest tones wet-in-wet. He makes a bright, airy patchwork of these transparent and granulating colors, being sure to leave generous white areas of paper throughout. He drops diluted paint into the washes, charging complements into them and again letting them mix on the paper. These color notes–made from the first tray–are light, clean, and fresh; they’re middle values and take up very little space in the composition–mainly the sky and foreground. Most of the picture at this stage is still untouched white paper.

Now, Burt moves to his second and third trays, which are darker, staining colors; they’ll carry the bulk of his design–in this case, the massive, rambling exterior wall and the palm trees that flank the building. But he still leaves small white areas on the paper for the light tones. He sloshes ahead, nearly filling the page with a great mottled mix of colors. “I use broken color mostly, these dark tones,” he says. He drops one of his yellows and some alizarin into a wash of ultramarine. “I’m trying to let the painting paint itself–changing the colors yet keeping the large shapes in the same dark value and also keeping it wet,” he says. “When the painting stays wet, things can happen. When the paint is dry, things don’t happen. Here, I have a mixture of Winsor yellow and Winsor green, but after using it, I’ll drop some alizarin into it in order to make it grayer: There’s a time to be shocking and there’s a time not to be. But before you hit the panic button and blot up the mess you think you’ve just made, wait. Watch what happens. Watch the paper.”

Burt’s brush stays on the move, finishing the frond of a palm tree at one end of the sheet, dropping to the foreground to swipe in a shadow, interrupting the drying of a color near the top of the wall with some wet, contrasting hue. He paints negative space, continuing to preserve an amazing variety of white shapes that will later read as sections of wall and roof and window–jutting planes catching the sunlight.

He also eliminates many of the whites saved from the previous stage. He does whatever it takes to make his dark pattern coherent at a glance. It’s uncanny the way his great expanse of dark, for all its richness of color, its contrasts, and its modulations, still manages to stay dark. Burt says, “When you work wet-in-wet, the hues tend to stay in the same value.”

Up to now, everything put down on the paper serves as a backdrop for the painting’s center of interest–in this case, a cluster of figures in the building’s entrance shadows. Burt, like many painters, concentrates his darkest darks on the composition’s focal point, where, typically, has also saved his whitest whites. By this time, he has already put down his highest chroma colors, such as opera pink with scarlet lake and opera pink with cadmium yellow, and complements Winsor green, Winsor yellow, or cobalt blue. For his darks, Burt relies on ultramarine blue with alizarin crimson and Winsor green with alizarin crimson. He says that as the painting progresses, the puddles become richer, or more complex, in color.

Burt rarely layers his color, but in the final stage of a work he may occasionally paint over a dried color to punch out a shape from its background. In this work, he sculpts a figure in the doorway’s shadow with a juicy mixture of alizarin and ultramarine. He then adds a few more inky accents of mixed blacks using Winsor green mixed with alizarin crimson–shadows in the architecture and in the foliage and calligraphic dots and dashes that enliven the picture surface.

Finally, chaos has turned to structure. The contrasts sing. The painting is finished. “My whole idea has been as much as possible to be spontaneous, to let most of the colors mix on the paper,” Burt says. “I’ve tried to keep the value patterns distinct–the light tones, the middle tones, and the dark tones–so that by the time I put in the darkest darks, they’ll really act as darks.” Burt believes it’s the value contrasts that make the subject stand out. He has saved whites, jabbed in dark accents, and engaged the eye with color conflicts in every portion of the picture space. “But,” he concludes, “even though there’s a lot to entertain you all over the work, your eye will still go to the focal point.”

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