Inner Workings (with glimpse at 2006 palette)

Inside of a painter's mind, filled with ideas, lines, colours, windows to the outside world. An image of a landscape on the bottom right is connected to a computer wafer board in the center to a palette of paint. By now the doodle style and the abstract styles had fused and realistic elements were creeping in. One cool feature of this painting was a faithful replica of my palette in 2006. Nowadays (2020) I am keeping a sketchbook with information on which paints I am using and what my palette looks like but in the old days I was just painting away every day. At the time I would have been living in Montreal in the second year of my postdoctoral fellowship at McGill.

This is a rare glimpse at which paints I had at the time. Indulge me as I 'geek out' here and analyze young Darlington. In the top-left four spots I see burnt sienna (PR101), Hooker's green (PR83+PG7), ultramarine blue (PB29), and viridian hue (PG7). In the mixing area of the top left there are blobs of viridian (PG18), cerulean blue (PB35) and what appears to be raw umber (PBr7). I am a little surprised by this- I was using earth colours in 2006 to make greens!? The bottom left of the palette is just a mixing area it contains Payne's grey (PR83+PBk7+PB27+PB29), viridian (PG18 or PG7), and a colour I can't identify it might be antwerp blue (a form of phthalo blue). Across the right from top to bottom I see cerulean blue, french ultramarine (maybe cobalt?), a warm yellow twice (PY3?), crimson lake (PR83+PR48), alizarin crimson (PR83), rose madder genuine, winsor red (PR254), burnt sienna (PR101), aureolin yellow (PY40). In the area around the thumb hole is rose madder genuine, and cerulean blue. The palette is set up to mix greens on the top left, darks on bottom left, sky blue on top right, warms center right, and clean greys on bottom right. I even copied the kinds of mixes that were on my palette at the time, I see warm neutral greens, darks made with alizarin, viridian and blues, light blues with cerulean, a variety of pinks and oranges, and the neutral greys from the delicate rose madder genuine. The rest of the painting contains examples of all the mixes possible.

What to make of this? I had my favorite combinations of colours and gave them each space on the palette. The mixing areas were based on their use- the blue of sky, the greens and darks for foliage and buildings, the greys for sidewalks and concrete. I had a full range of neutral pastel tones from some interesting pigments. One thing I notice is how awesome the french ultramarine and burnt sienna looked, wish I remembered where they came from, probably Winsor and Newton.

One more note, I hit 100 blogs for the year which equals my highest output in the whole year of 2008 which was the first year of the blog. 

 22 x 24" cold press, watercolour, 2006