A Landscape Painter’s Guide to Enjecting Emotion into Your Paintings – Easel Talk #47
Emotion is the Container
Unlike working with the human figure where emotion can be portrayed by a pose or facial expression, landscape art relies on more subtle ways of imparting emotional content. I’m all about painting emotions. That’s my thing. People think I’m into trees or skies, but these are the container, the conveyor of emotion in my work. That emotion isn’t overt. It’s not “I want you to feel happy.” It’s coming up from my response to the scene and what I want to express.
In many ways, tonalism is emotional painting. It strives to convey the psychological and emotional content of a scene more so than bare natural facts. Every aspect of painting is interrelated, and one of the main points of my work is that you click each element into focus, one at a time, and that’s what we’re doing today.
Values Set the Tone
The first way I get emotion across in my painting is with the relative values of the work. Whether it’s light, dark, or dark overall will set the general tone of the piece. Much of the actual tone and quality of the work is imparted by values more than color.
If you look at some of my black and white paintings, you can get a tonal effect across entirely without color. This personally opened my eyes up to what Tonalism really is. A lot of people think it’s about color, but the big point is: it’s value first.
Try doing some monochromatic paintings. Since value is the underpinning, the underlying structure, it deserves its own amount of focus. We often skip right past values and jump into color. It’s good to dial it back. It’s good to separate them, even though they’re never separate in actual painting. Every color has lightness or darkness as an attribute, and then it has the hue component.
Drama Versus Intimacy
I always set out to create a harmonious and engaging blend of different values with a good emphasis on strong contrast opposed to subtle areas of value modulation.
A distinct relationship with the emotional content of the scene is set up by the value contrasts. Generally speaking, the darker the shadow areas are and the lighter the highlight areas, the more strident and impactful the scene will be. Strong contrast creates emotional resonance for sure. If you want a quieter effect, dial back the contrast.
Conversely, if you want a more intimate and nuanced emotional tone in the painting, hold back from going to black in your darkest tones as you proceed to the lightest colors. If you want a dawn, a quiet dawn, foggy, the fog is going to make the darks less dark and the lights more diffuse. The overall effect when there’s not bright light on it creates that intimacy.
Color: The Emotional Finish
Where values lead, color follows. Values are where I start, but the emotional finish is always done with color.
I think a lot of painters starting out see the color they want to get across and start smacking it in without reckoning with the values. Many times they push the saturation levels too far because they don’t know how to mix colors yet, so they rely on extreme hues straight from the tube. That’s a problem.
Here’s a quick tip: You never use just straight-up any pigment from the tube directly on your work. You’re going to adulterate it. My main go-to for something warmer is to add a little bit of raw umber. That might bring in a greenish component, so I might adjust it with my mixing red (Winsor Newton cad red hue). Or I may adulterate it in a cool way by adding a little ivory black. That little bit of complexity you’re adding to the colors is really essential if you want paintings that resonate with people.
The Sunrise/Sunset Quality
I’m usually going for the type of emotional response that we have when experiencing a sunrise or sunset in nature, or twilight. There’s always a special feeling stimulated by that quality of light and the way colors arrange themselves, especially in the sky.
Many times though, you can bring a lot of the same sorts of feelings and tones into the painting of morning or afternoon by bringing warmer colors into the clouds, or cooler ones. Instead of simply rendering the sky with blue, white, and gray, you can introduce ochres, subtle taupes, and even rust tones. This creates far more emotional content in the sky and scene than just painting a factual interpretation.
That’s really one of the keystones of getting emotion in your work: forget about the facts and start working on the subjective. Art is 100% about the subjective, and it requires experimentation. Experimentation is another way of saying failing. If you worry every time you set out to paint that it has to be successful and great, that might prevent you from trying things. Instead, say: “I’m going to try this by painting this blue sky with gray clouds and inject a bunch of color. If it doesn’t look good, I have the experience.” That’s what I’ve had to do.
The Foliage Approach
In foliage areas, your reference might just have everyday dark and light greens and possibly some umber or gray tones. It’s often quite valuable to introduce more reddish types of color, especially in the middle range. This brings in a warmth, and with warmth comes an inviting resonance.
The greens presented to you in photo reference are usually quite banal. One of my tricks: instead of just mixing dark green, middle green, light green, I’ll mix dark green, dark red, middle green, middle red, light green, orangey green. You can inject that orangey feel in foliage at any time. You don’t have to wait for sunset.
The Modeling Trap
The problem: many artists becoming aware of the relationship between color and emotion push the saturation levels of their paintings too far. Colors that look like they came straight out of the tube. They don’t know how to mix colors properly yet.
The solution: Set up a general framework where all the colors are related. That is tonalism. That is tonal painting. It’s psychological, not glazing.
I set up a general theme, then push the colors as far as I can without going into oversaturation. If you have your framework of colors set up, you can push colors really far. I don’t come in with that bright orange first. I come in with darker, rustier tones that have been adulterated with raw umber or burn umber. Then I leave a place where I’m going to start putting in more saturated color. So it’s all set up and supported. Then we pop in the bright color.
Make all the bad paintings with bad color. Just do it. Experiment. Work small. Try things out. This is how you build up your faculty, like working out. You can’t lift 500 pounds your first day at the gym, but if you increase the weight over time, you’ll get there.
The Power of Premixed Colors
One of the things you can do is support yourself as a painter by premixing your string of colors before you paint. This gives you a chance to get a feel for the color story of the painting without having to put paint directly on the board.
This is a subjective response. Feeling is best accessed through the experience of expressing it, not talking about it, not reading about it, not watching videos about it.
Premixing gives you a chance to work out your story. Once I start painting, that’s the past. I’m going to use the work that past Mike did. This present Mike is the one making the painting. You can look down on your palette progression and get a real sense of the story of the painting. As you go, you line them up, you knock them down. It’s just another way to support yourself so you can get through it.
Intuitive Color Decisions
For the most part, my color decisions are made intuitively after setting up the initial tone and palette of my reference image.
If you pay attention to your responses to the reference or the scene you’re painting and your color mixing palettes, and hold those perceptions in a space of calm expectation, many times you will find suggestions arise for the direction you should be taking the colors. That’s what you want to develop. You develop it through painting experience.
The more you rely on this inner prompting, the stronger it becomes to the point where it becomes an inherent part of your process.
Developing this internal color-mixing prompting is much like driving a car. When you first start out, you have to pay attention to everything. What’s going on around me? Gas pedal, brake pedal, steering wheel, lights, windshield wipers. It’s overwhelming. But with practice it becomes almost completely unconscious.
Painting is very similar. Early on, much of the process has to be performed in the conscious part of your mind. But with time, patience, and development, you can build up your faculty of making good intuitive color decisions that can really help drive your painting process forward.
Pulling It All Together
All of this stuff adds up to you projecting lots of emotion into your work. It’s paying attention to the value structure: do I want this dark or light or up the middle? If you’re into Tonalism, you’re mentally thinking about it, you’re going a little into the light, you’re pulling back onto the dark.
Set up the stage with the values. Finish it with the color. This is a bit of practice. Knowing when to pick a certain color, knowing when to hold off on another color, these are muscles you build over time.
The last thing I want to say: knowing that you have an intention to express yourself matters. You don’t have to put it into words. I don’t say “I want someone to feel this way when they look at my painting.” I think: This makes me feel a certain way. How can I get more of that into my painting? It’s pushing the color a little here, pushing the brightness a little there. Those sorts of things.
Take good care of yourself. Stay out of trouble. And fight the power.
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