Before American art became a force in the world of painting, subjects tended to be portraits, history, mythology, or architecture. It was the American painter Thomas Cole who established the American landscape as its own genre, and even more American painters followed, loving landscape solely for its own beauty, not merely as a backdrop.
June is my favorite month weatherwise, known for its lush grass, green trees, and forests InSide the Back Mountain and beyond in Pennsylvania. It's also one of the toughest months to paint landscapes since the entire natural setting resembles a huge bowl of salad with its multiple shades of green!
Scientists tell us there are more than 300 shades of green. Personally, I believe artists can see more than that! Green is a color that symbolizes new beginnings. Green stands for growth, renewal, abundance, health, harmony, and freshness. Green is a secondary color, which means it's a combination of two primaries: blue (a calming color) and yellow (the color of energy). Beyond that, artists who mix colors for a painting are trained to identify a color by its four characteristics: hue, which means its name in the spectrum; value or key, which is light or dark; chroma or intensity, which means bright or dull; and a hue’s warm or cool temperature. For instance, sage plants may be a light value, low chroma, cool green. Lime may be described as a high key, high chroma, warm green. It's fun to mix pigment once you identify the four characteristics of a color! Of course, the pigment industry supplies us with tubes of celadon, chartreuse, terre verte, viridian, sap, and Hooker’s Green, but every manufacturer’s product is a slightly different color!
My oil painting of Shickshinny from the mountain across the river especially exemplifies the month of June. This “salad bowl” does have a few spots of red in those downtown buildings, but it mostly consists of many of those 300 shades of green! Strokes of pigment are used to define close-up and distant foliage, while a touch of yellow-green seems to bring some trees closer, and blue-green indicates shadows and depth. Just for fun, squint your eyes and stare at the painting for a moment. Do you see the darker blue-green elongated shapes like the fingers of a hand entering the composition from the left where the “wrist” is located? That’s called a half-radial composition! Composition is the way artists design the picture’s elements in order to move the viewer’s eye through the artwork. Artists are sneakier than you think!
In my watercolor painting of the Susquehanna River just below the confluence of Bowman’s Creek, blue-greens in much lighter values indicate the more distant mountain. Sun shines on the yellow-green trees on the right, while those on the left are cool, shadowed, darker, duller greens. Again, if you squint your eyes and stare at the painting, you can not only imagine the difference in temperature that we will feel as we paddle out of the shadows around the bend, but you can also identify a full radial composition as the fulcrum of the compositional “spokes” seem to radiate from the tiny paddler just rounding the bend ahead of us!
The watercolor painting of the red truck in Sugar Hollow is an example of how the greens of the June landscape morph into the golds of later summer, especially after fields are hayed. Still, that red truck is actually little more than a bright red tomato in a salad bowl accompanied by some pale yellow corn shoots sprouted by my friend Luke! This composition is intersecting diagonals. Even though the mountain on the left has the same trees as the one in the center, its form passes behind into the distance depicted in a pale blue-green haze.
Painting is actually the art of illusion, creating the idea that there are “real things” like rivers, trees, skies, trucks, farms, fields, and buildings on that totally flat sheet of paper or canvas! Painting is a fascinating “sleight of hand” and brush. Besides, it's FUN!
How many shades of green can you see out your window? Or in your neighbor’s garden? Or up through the game lands in Noxen? Or along Harveys Creek as it winds down along Route 29? June is a salad bowl of green, but green can be our harbinger of healthy, wealthy, and wise! Did you know social scientists tell us green is the favorite color of most geniuses? And a room painted green can actually improve a child’s learning capabilities and memory retention! Let’s celebrate all our hundreds of wonderful greens InSide the Back Mountain this month!
This article originally appeared in the June 2024 publication of InSide the Back Mountain.