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Have you ever done work you ought to be very happy with, and yet there is something about the art that you can’t identify – something which is causing an “itch” in your mind? (And you so want to be able to scratch it!)

Some of my paintings have “itched” for a while. I really needed to get to the bottom of why I reacted to them that way. We’re taught to analyze our own paintings, and I geared up my brain and set to it. Was it the compositions? Or maybe the colors? Should I crop, or expand the views? Were there enough of lead-ins? Had I placed the horizon too high or low? But no, there was nothing obvious that was wrong, and the “itch” remained. It, whatever “it” was, didn’t affect every painting, either.

Thinking and analyzing clearly wouldn’t give me any answers. Solving this mystery demanded an entirely different method.

Back to Basics

I decided to focus on the reason why I paint, namely my love of color. My project was to paint my way around the color wheel (plus black and white objects) by taking objects of one color family, bring them outdoors and paint still lifes in the brilliant sunshine.

Exploring color by doing simple studies is how I started my serious artistic journey, back when. Color is of course not only the hue, color is also chroma and value, so color studies automatically also become chroma studies, and value studies.

This was meant to be simple fun, so I didn’t allow myself the more cerebral aspects of painting. The brightly colored objects from my household were simply put down on colorful cloths on a table, instead of carefully chosen, arranged and composed in order to adhere to all the “rules” artists are taught to follow. I wanted to play, to have fun, to get the full sensory experience of painting outdoors. My aim was to get into that state called Flow, where one doesn’t think verbally and critically, but instead see what is there and react to it, while experiencing the singing of birds, the light caress of the wind, and the scent of lilacs in full bloom.

First Clue

As I happily painted away, a nagging sense of discomfort was starting to bother me. I realized that I was expecting to get negative comments from other artists about my simple studies of color. It dawned on me that the time I used to spend on artist’s forums showing my work and viewing other artist’s paintings had had a lasting effect on me. I left such forums because, while most people on them were very nice and helpful, there were always a few who saw it as their mission to criticize severely those artists who didn’t adhere to all the rules they had deemed to be what “real art” is about. I left these venues, but in hindsight I didn’t do it time. Some of these negative comments had stayed in my head, and had subconsciously affected how I judged my own paintings. 

As artists, we have to be aware of how humans function: we seek praise and gravitate towards doing what gets praised, and move away from what gets frowned upon. We humans are hard-wired that way. With awareness of this phenomenon, we can stay true to our own artistic voice. Or to put it another way: we can follow our different drummer. That was my conscious reason for leaving forums.

I had not changed how I painted, but I felt this discomfort while sticking to my artistic vision. But this discomfort was still not the “itch”, I had to keep searching.

Second Clue

As I looked at all my color studies, I was happy enough with them and felt the “itch” with only one of them, the White. This was something I could use to solve the mystery. There was nothing seriously wrong with either the hues or the chroma, and the composition didn’t matter in this project. The one thing left to consider was values.

Valuable values

While the values of each painting were correct, the “itch” happened with the painting White. It is clearly a high-key painting, and that’s fine. Then an idea flew through my head – what if I check the value ranges of some of these studies? How many values on a value scale do they span? 

Most of the paintings have a balanced span, with the major masses ranging over six values, with a few darker and lighter accents (not shown in the image). However, White has a shorter span, only about four values, which is quite natural for a high-key painting.

Now it was time to check the value range of one of the “itchy” landscape paintings, Saltsjöbaden, Towards Land. I found that its range of values of the major masses were also more narrow and tending towards the lighter side of the scale.

Aha!

The mystery was solved. It simply had to do with my own personal preferences. I happen to like paintings that span over a greater range of values. Other people prefer anything from low- or high-keyed pictures to solid mid-value ones. 

It took going back to basics to solve this mystery and to get to know more about myself. I learned that I need to be more alert to how I react to judgmental criticism. (A whole topic in itself.) And I can happily paint pictures which have a narrow value range without being bothered by the “itch”, as it is now thoroughly scratched.

One would think one would learn from ones mistakes... but oh no, I repeated the mistake from Red of using a too small piece of paper for this pastel painting. So at one point I got fed up with how small the objects were in the painting, and simply stopped painting, and abandoned this effort:

The things I did right was to use objects of different opacity and different yellows (having learned the lesson from Red). However, the set-up was boring, and got too small.

I realized that what I really wanted to do was to paint something that was not an outdoor still life. Mentally, I had already finished my project. I told myself sternly to persevere, and actually finish Yellow, the very last painting in my color study series, before embarking on a new project.

The odd glass bottle was a particular challenge:

It is transparent but frosted glass, and the shape is odd. It takes some effort and time to get right in a painting, so for time reasons I chose the easy way of turning it so it looks straight. Then I visually zoomed in on the objects, chose the yellow bell pepper to be the star of the show, and did a new painting on top of the erased first effort:

As my heart wasn't really in it any longer, so Yellow will probably also go into the pile of paintings to recycle. The goal is accomplished, and every painting will not be a masterpiece -- even if all artists want each one to be just that. I have heard that a very famous artist who does fantastic work claims that only every 20th painting he or she does is good enough. Man, that's high standards, and probably very wise.

There are nearly no red objects in my home, so I chose a bell pepper and some tomatoes for Red.

I learned two lessons doing this one:

1) Size does matter

The painting was simply too small for my comfort. (8x8 inches, 20x20 cm) The tomatoes are merely suggested because of that.

2) Plan even a simple study, or else

The vegetables/fruits were too similar in color and the light travelled through them to a similar extent. The white plate added odd reflections. Result: Too few color variations.

At this point, I'm really longing to paint something else. I do like to paint still lifes, and I do like to paint outdoors, but I'm starting to feel a bit "overfed" with the experience. I crave variety, which is why I have chosen to paint in a certain way that some call 'style', instead of painting the same types of motifs.

This study Red will be erased, and the expensive artist's sanded paper will get a new painting.

When I finished, I had my models for lunch: