Table, Chair, Window, Egg

This is a rendering of a portion of an old church on Melville Street, in Pittsfield, where I live. The church is about a block and a half from my studio. Incidentally, the street itself is named after Herman Melville who lived and worked about five miles from Pittsfield. My drawing of this church conforms to some very powerful rules of painting and drawing which I would like to point out. You are going to need a table and a chair, an egg and a window in order to understand these rules. I’m sorry but it has to be a brown egg, white just won’t do. I do hope you have a table and a chair. My neighbors don’t but that is neither here nor there.

Once you have all the necessary things, set the egg on the table near a window, at a time of day when there is strong sunlight. Electric light is useless, but I can’t get into that right now. Sit down in the chair and take a good hard look at the egg. Here is what you are going to see. A brown egg. But that is not all, the portion toward the window and the light is going to be very light, practically white. The portion of the egg farthest from the window is going to be in shadow and therefore a kind of dark brown. That portion of the egg in the middle is exactly egg color, in painting and drawing this is called the “Middle Tone” When we say that a thing is a certain color we are referring to this middle tone. Take a red silk scarf for example, in its middle tones it is red, in the shadow it is maroon to black, and in the light it is a pink to white. And so on with flesh colors, or any other object’s colors..

Now here is the rule I am driving at. In a painting or a drawing the majority of the image should be middle tone. Some portions, preferably receding planes, will be in the light, and some in shadow. But here is the point, the majority of the image is in the middle tone.

Now we come to my drawing which is very much like the egg on a table. Coincidentally I have stained the paper brown egg color but that is a coincidence. The majority of my forms are in the middle tone and lit by a half light, that is the incident light from all over. The direct light falls on only those forms which are turned to the right, Forms turned to the left go into shadow, just like on the egg.

If you go to a museum looking for examples to this idea you will certainly find it. The trick is rather to find an exception. It is one of those rules like The Law Of Centrifugal Force. It’s not something you decide to obey, it just takes over and operates of its own accord where ever there is movement. And so the law of the middle tone operates where ever there is painting and drawing.