Painting in the Dark

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Last week I posted a drawing in which I wrote about a book written in the fifteenth century, by Cennini, called the Craftsman’s Handbook. In that book are elaborate but archaic directions for all kinds of painting, and drawing. The drawing I am posting today follows some of these directions very exactly. He says “To do a preparatory drawing first mix up in three bowls three tints of a color, one darker than the next and starting with the lightest tint, with the brush quite dry, shade in all the forms of the drawing. Then go on to the next darker tint, and finish up with the darkest.” All this is to be done on a sheet of paper which has been tinted a middle tone with a wash of watered down paint. When all the shading is done with the brush then you go back and pick out all the highlights with white paint, again with the brush quite dry.

Almost half of the book is devoted to formulas and recipes for mixing and preparing shades and tints and colors in “bowls” for draperies, skys, mountains, flesh, and many other things. But what I am driving at here is the fact that in ancient times, before electric light, or even gas light, colors were not mixed up on the spot as a painter went along, looking at the work and then back at a palate. On the contrary the entire palate of colors and tints for a painting would be mixed up before hand perhaps even in a different place, and carried to the work place in jars.

All the reproductions that we have of old paintings such as the big wall paintings that you see in European churches were photographed with the most modern electric illumination, but if you view these works in there pristine darkness you can hardly see them.

The first thing a painter thinks when looking for example at the Sistine Ceiling is, “How could he ever have seen what he was doing with just candles for light.” So this is where the idea of the controlled palate comes in. Those painters knew what they were doing because the paint had already been mixed, they know what they were doing because the preliminary drawings were done elsewhere and were life sized. These procedures give an artist tremendous control over the image.

This drawing measures 7” x 9.”. It is painted on tinted cold press watercolor paper with a acrylic paint, with highlights put in with white paint and a brush. It is signed with full signature and date in the border along the bottom of the drawing. Richard Britell August 23, 2001.