Success is Black and White

Why Painters should know that Value is the dominant factor in our perception and therefore in visual art

The Biggest Win

Where to begin?? Visual art is complex and there are as many styles of painting as there are painters. Faced with this who is to say what matters and who has got it right or wrong?

Yet there are clearly better and worse paintings out there, but can that really be pinned on some kind of inherent creative quality?

Amateur painters often seem surprised when after struggling to paint anything worthwhile they unexpectedly create a good work, yet can’t explain how? they did it, or make it happen again. We’ve all heard an art club member explaining that a certain painting which went well ‘ just fell off the brush.’

But if we discount luck and happy chance, is there in fact a secret or commonality which lies under the surface of all good paintings, which they happened to stumble across?

?The Old Masters certainly thought so, and many artists are now venerated for the ‘secrets’ which are thought to lie tantalisingly behind their technique.

While it is true that every great artist developed their own understanding of principles from which their working method was derived, I place no faith in secrets.

Not least because who after spending years learning the ‘secrets’ of (for instance),? JMW Turner would want to use them? There has already been a great artist called Turner who developed them and, at the very best anyone learning his methods, would be seen as derivative if they replicated a proven and obviously derivative method.

Rather than place my faith in the so called secrets of the old masters , I think it is much more exciting and useful to look for principles that all good technique must necessarily be based upon.

Principles like composition, orchestration, colour and tone are universal and must lie at the heart of every method of every master since painting began.

Luckily there is a singularity at the centre of visual art, a singularity that transcends creative preferences or individual skill.

All paintings are visual, and all visual things must take account of how we quite literally see the world.

I know that ‘seeing’ can be taken to mean artistic or creative vision, but let’s keep this literal. I mean quite simply how we see paintings with our eyes.

While we might all appreciate a painting according to our preferences we all see it in the same way: signals from the eye are sent for the brain for us to decode and create a mental image of whatever we are looking at.

We have evolved with brains which anticipate that whatever we are looking it will be complex and ever changing, so we instinctively are more perceptive to some inputs over others. The part of brain which determines where we are in relation to a perceived object gets our immediate and urgent attention, because if we see a lion running towards us where we are in relation to it is far more important than the colour of the sky behind it.

The distinguished Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School Margret Livingstone calls the part of our brain which deals with this? the ‘Where’ system, a hard wired survival system that’s been with us since we first evolved primitive eyes which just perceived simple contrasts.

Contrasts in light and dark, or Values as artists call them, are by far the most important optical signals the brain receives, which makes? managing them central to good visual art.

In a field as subjective as painting there are not many facts and cast iron guarantees you can take to the bank,? but how we see light and dark (value) is one of them.

Visual art with strong and coherent value contrasts is more compelling than visual art which has weak, lost contradictory or confusing value changes.

This is easy to explore, simply take any weak painting in your studio and extend its value range by making the dark darker and the lights lighter, and it will inexorably, almost magically, improve.

Value for Painters

Value means light and dark and it is impossible to paint without encountering it.? Even a simple pencil and paper sketch?for instance depends upon parts of it being lighter or darker than others.

So for visual artists using value isn’t a choice, in the way that one might choose a genre, a scale? a working method or a palette for instance. Value is inseparable from painting and because of that, at the most fundamental level, all painting really boils down to a great extent to the?controlled placement of lights and darks.

Thanks to the perceptual dominance of our Where system artists can create recognisable images of things just by using black and white. Gradate the changes from dark to light and thrown in a variance between translucent dark paints and opaque light ones and those recognisable forms suddenly, almost magically appear to become believably three dimensional.

Value then is the key principle at work behind traditional representational painting, and the reason that many contemporary painters, who may reject 'being trained', or 'being classical', routinely fail to create visually compelling work. A quick look at my website https://www.martinkinnear.com will assure you that I am absolutely not a classicist with a point to prove, but a contemporary painter who is interested in becoming a better one. ? ?

Because of its primacy, all traditional painting systems such as grisaille, brunaille or verdaccio (monochromatic black and white, earth tones and greens respectively) begin with the creation of some kind of value based underpainting.

Even modern painting which dispenses with traditional underpainting generally starts by working from some kind of mid toned ground which allows easier perception of value changes as the work evolves.

All of these painting practices depend upon artists being able to visualise and define levels of contrast, because in painting one can rarely rely upon perceived values outdoors or in a well lit studio to create strong work.

In the real world there are an almost infinite and infinitesimal number of gradations between light and dark.

While it may be both true and poetic to wonder at the lightening sky or gathering dusk you need something more concrete to paint either effect, artists need a Value scale.

To manage and orchestrate value it has to be defined by a commonly agreed scale in which any given perceived value can be expressed as a number and reproduced as a match to a greyscale swatch.

The Where system which perceives Value contrast is the reason Values are so important to painters, but the Value scale which defines levels of contrast is the essential tool which allows painters to actively exploit and manage that perception.

This is not a ‘how to’ article (my courses do that), but to appreciate how Value can be used it is important for me to briefly explain how a value scale is set out.? ?

For the purposes of describing or planning a painting, Values are generally arranged in a ten point scale (Black 1, White 10).

Black is the darkest or lowest Value, White is the lightest or highest Value, with greys (lighter blacks or darker whites), falling between the two.

Just as any tune in any piece of music can be understood to be an arrangement of a finite number of notes, Any painting can be seen as an arrangement of these ten values.

Just like the notes in orchestral music, value changes can be made to swirl, swell and orchestrate across a piece. Too little variety and the piece becomes plodding and dull, too much change and it becomes disconcordant.

Exploring the ten point Value scale was a huge step forward in my education as a painter because I realised that by using it I could begin to define the genius behind my favourite works by Caravaggio and his startlingly dramatic paintings where brightly spotlit figures emerge from deep dark shadow.

In his painting studio of course,?it would be impossible to paint brightly lit figures from an easel positioned in the kind of inky blackness depicted in one of Caravaggio’s works. Value can and should be applied creatively, not literally or observational, paintings is a mimetic art, not an exercise in slavish reproduction of the observed. This might seem like an obvious point to make , but it is an important one, for it means that the Value contrasts in Caravaggio’s works are designed and applied, rather than observed and transcribed. How I wish that more artists escaped the trap of literalism - but that's a whole new conversation....

Caravaggio’s system for exploring value depends upon a startlingly simple and effective idea; maximise the contrast between the subject and the background.

In practice this meant contrasting highly detailed opaque and brightly lit subjects, against a startlingly plain, inky black ground.

Value was the key to this, and in this he conceptualised the use of Value in two interrelated ways.

Firstly he thought of the overall Value of his work, how light or dark it generally appeared to be. The overall impression of lightness or darkness in a work can be thought off as its Value Key. A predominantly dark painting for instance is a low key one, a predominantly pale one is a high key work. On the ten point value scale it is useful to think as any given work being? created in line with a low key, mid key or high key scheme; and Caravaggio’s greatest work are invariably low key.? ?

Alongside the overall key of a painting, Caravaggio also managed Value Range, or the difference between the lightest light and darkest dark within the work.

A painting with very little value contrast within it will look washed out and can be said to have a narrow range. A work with moderate value contrasts will appear to be livelier and can be said to exhibit a mid value range.

A work with the maximum possible contrast between light and dark will be inherently more compelling and can be described as having a wide value range.

If those value changes are amplified by strong compositional choices then it is hard not to create a strong work; so much for ‘falling off the brush.’

Value has been the most important factor in our vision and in visual art since the dawn of time, but Caravaggio’s genus was not to discover it, but to devise a system for its use by amplifying what he observed to be good practice in the works of earlier masters.

While he would not have used my modern terminology, by setting his Value Key to Low and his Value Range to Wide, Caravaggio created a style which was so compelling to our Where systems that it became the dominant style in European art until Impressionism.

This simple system was so effective that it became known throughout western Europe as chiaroscuro, and the artists who employed it became known for centuries as Caravaggisti.

Art historians will tell you that the Old Masters were concerned with value based tonal paintings for the simple fact that they did not have many colours, but it does not then follow that having more colours makes better pictures.

When Value lost its value

The Impressionist movement of 1874 which eventually swept away the dominance of the Caravaggisti, only lasted for eight shows, and was never fully embraced by many of the artists who are now recognised as leading members of? what became the Impressionists.

Although Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Paul Cezanne were enthused and dazzled by the creative potential of their new colourful Impressionist works, they also understood very clearly that something fundamental had been overlooked or even lost in their passion to embrace colour as the primary means of creating visual art.

Colour is an important factor in perception as the basis of our ‘What’ system, as well as carrying with it symbolism and psychology. Together these give colour an intellectual, symbolic and emotional resonance, yet do not make it a true alternative to our hard wired preference for value.

Long before Caravaggio created his works, value was the primary force in human perception, after his death it continued to be so, and whichever colours we devise and means to see images going forward Value will always remain the dominant force in human perception and therefore visual art. ? ?

For this reason when painters suddenly found themselves with unprecedented access to more colours than the Old Masters the pictures they created with them were different, not necessarily stronger or better.

Degas, Manet and Cezanne never fully embraced the Impressionist revolution because they understood through comparing their contemporary works with those of the masters at the Louvre, that while colour is fundamental to how we feel about a painting, it is not the primary force in human perception: Value is.

All of this means that as a painter the most fundamental thing to optimise in your work is Value. I do not mean by that you can ignore colour, composition, optics, innovative mark making or the thousand other things which might enable you to express your creative vision , only that you get Value wrong at your peril.

More positively, the next time one of your works ‘ falls off the brush’ you can bet that the values in it are good.

Value can work for and against you on many levels, from planning active compositions, to placing focal points, or creating the illusions of depth, Form or luminosity. ?

The Problem of Value

Our brains do a great job at never letting us see how we assess value and colour inputs separately, for instance while a jet black object painted against a snow white surface is obviously contrasting, it can be harder to judge whether a vivid red is lighter or darker than a vivid green.

Unfortunately this means that untrained painters often conflate Value contrast with colour saturation; confusing the effect of choosing a bright (high Value) green with opting for a vivid (high saturation) green for instance.

Paintings which are painted a very high saturation are often surprisingly underwhelming because saturation of colour is in perceptual terms, no substitute for value contrast.

The use of strong saturated colour choices in a value controlled process is one of the transformative approaches of the great Modernists such as Henri Matisse, and I will discuss that in due course.

However the take out in this foundational chapter on what is common to all painting, is that to our brain, strong colour is not any substitute for strong value.

While the Post Impressionists such as Cezanne, Braque, Derain and Matisse went on to become masters of managing colour and value, they were by no means the first wave of artists to appreciate that colour itself could not be relied upon to create strong work.

The great landscape painter Claude Lorraine famously used a reflective black surface (a Claude glass), to allow himself to view a reflection of the subject stripped of misleading colour contrasts.

By taking much of the perceived colour out, Claude was able to better appreciate the underlying value structures in his subject. Value structure in painting? can be thought of as the note structure in a piece of music. Just as composers orchestrate notes various keys towards counterpoint and climax, painters orchestrate value

This mattered to Claude because he was interested in painting complex historical and allegorical history paintings. To do this he might for instance combine an observed landscape with a fantastical sea port and populate it with heroes, nymphs and gods. Faced with the challenge of creating such imagined scenes from fragments of what he could observe Claude paid great attention to orchestrating his compositions.

Of all the things which lie behind good composition, Value is key; and as all visual art is invariably also visual design, composition always counts.

By revealing the underlying values in a scene though his reflective black mirror, Claude could better orchestrate them compositionally creating a value structure which held his work together, creating asymmetric tensions and harmonies which elegantly directed viewers around his nuanced and complex landscapes.? ? ?

The primacy of value in creating nuanced compositions?also lay at the heart of Jean Babtiste Camille Corot’s painting.

For Corot, perhaps the greatest of the later tonal painters, Value structure, not colour was the key to all painting.

As he himself remarked of his process ‘The most important things in a painting are Form and Value. Colour comes last - like a friend you welcome.’

Corot’s opinion matters because not only was he the last and greatest master of traditional value based tonal painting to work before Impressionism, his technique was acknowledged by none other than Claude Monet, as being inherently superior to Impressionism.

When Monet admitted that ‘ Next to Corot, we are nothing’, insightful contemporaries such as Degas knew that he was talking about the seemingly insoluble problem of creating colour led yet Value driven work.

This problem is still easy to visualise if one looks at a couple of what were then contemporary paintings at the Musee D’ Orsay in Paris.

In the Barbazon School galleries on the ground floor the figures of peasant women in Millet’s ‘The Gleaners’ appear to be almost monumental as they toil in the cornfields, while their work is menial and the subject commonplace, in painting their figures become dignified, almost sculptural in appearance.

Painting has transformed a simple everyday scene and the simple everyday people depicted in it,? into something mounumental.

In the impressionist galleries above, the gleaners and workers in the fields and gardens painted by Sisley or Pissarro are not monumental but instead appear as insubstantial even ephemeral smatters of paint, lost amongst a field of other inconsequential brushstrokes.

The classical value based paintings of Millet, Courbet, Daubigny and Corot created pictures in which value orchestration was not just possible but central to the art of? creating images.

Impressionism, for all of its daring colour and painterly physicality failed to create anything monumental in its first flowering.? ? ? ? ?

The solution to developing colour led but value driven paintings was not to come until an obscure artist from Aix called Paul Cezanne meditated over what he saw in the works of both the Old Masters and the avant garde Impressionists in search of a solution. Cezanne knew that if he could discover the means to reconcile value with colour he would've found a system that was both progressive and monumental;? exulting when he did that he intended to ‘astonish Paris with an Apple.’

So if you are looking to improve almost anything you paint, then you really do not have to look further than making your values work, because nothing makes a painting more compelling than well placed and well orchestrated values.

True, optimising value is a complex and subtle art, particularly in respect to colour but it is the one thing that is always worth your while to work on.

If you are just starting out as a painter then make it your habit to visualise everything you choose to paint from in black and white before you painting it, as doing so will? strip away distracting colour and reveal the all important values in your subject. If you are an improving painter who wants to get away from creating competent but dull work then push out your value range, its the quickest way to make anything more compelling.

Even if you’re an advanced painter ask yourself if you are really on top of your values and whether you are relying too much on weaker options such as optics, saturation or temperature to carry your work when value could do a better and cleaner job.

Martin Kinnear is an award winning contemporary painter and tutor with an international following, visit https://www.norfolkpaintingschoollive.com to find out more.