Today, back to paintings! When I was involved in the BBC TV series The Impressionists I was disappointed that they centred the drama on only six painters (Manet, Monet, Bazille, Renoir, Degas, and Cézanne - who wasnt an impressionist) but left out Camille Pissarro (1830-1903). Pissarro was a very good painter, certainly better and more interesting than Bazille (who died too young to show his real potential) and Pissarro also stayed closer to the heart of what the impressionist movement was about than any of the others except Monet himself. I really like the way that Pissarro painted, particularly his luscious use of rich colours. His daring use of strong greens is really nice. Green is not an easy colour to use; its too easy to mix a wide range of greens that look wrong, but he always gets it right. Like all good oil painters he was good at mixing precisely the right colours for the scene he was painting - and the atmosphere he wanted us to see. Having a good eye for colour is essential for his kind of painting. Pissarro was helped by the fact that in his colour mixes he used a colour that is hard to obtain these days, Chrome green. What we call Chrome green nowadays is in fact a different colour based on a different pigment from what he used. In fact the Chrome green that he used wasnt based on one pigment, but a mixture of two - usually Chrome yellow and Prussian blue. This very beautiful colour is hard to buy now, mainly because proper genuine Chrome yellow has largely been replaced by Cadmium yellow, which is not the same. It is still, nevertheless, possible to mix beautiful and realistic looking greens in oil paintings, of course, but it is not easy. One of the reasons for this is because of how our eyes see colour; where green occurs in the spectrum means that our eyes can distinguish a greater range of greens than any other colour. Think of how many greens there is around you (and that have names), compared to the range of reds! Anyway, back to Pissarro, here are two representative examples of his work in this context, The Little Bridge and The Village Church.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 09:52:40 +0000
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