The most important thing to remember when painting using broken color is that you are trying to make the painting itself become light so it has an independent life. Take a look at the painting of mine shown here (see bigger version), done in sunlight, I’m trying to express my enjoyment of the colors and energy of the light that seemingly drips over everything.
A smudge of warm gray bumps up against a streak of orangy green. The strokes are open and left to sing – I hope – by interacting at a distance to create the vibrancy of the visual world that I’m immersed and lost within.
These broken-apart strokes that release the color, follow an underpainting in which I 'scumbled' abstract layers of colors. I then squint in order to simplify and see relationships and look for little sensations of color and try to put them down with single separate brushstrokes.
The length and size of the brushstroke or the pattern is determined by my mood or feeling that I am getting back from tasting the subject with my eyes. I don’t worry about a thing except getting the thing through the color. If I am faithful to the relationships of color and value that I see, the subject will come together at a distance with a great deal of freshness and liveliness.
The Use of Broken Color Today
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, few people actually paint like this today. The new painting is considered old fashioned by many, including the gate-keepers or the art experts. In fact, painting itself is considered 'dead' by many experts. But that leaves the rest of us who go on anyway, like the 'insurgents'.
The power of the personal brushstroke is very much alive even when we are not using broken color per se. True enough, there seems to be an aesthetic afoot that once again wishes to see the brushstroke disappear. And there are many incredibly good artists, like Diebenkorn, whose flat scrubby kind of painting is, indeed, magical.
Much to my chagrin, the art world has moved beyond 'painting the light' if for no other reason that there are few teachers left who really continue to explore the practice. In the end, contemporary painters regardless of their perspective often just cannot deny that personal urge to drag a loaded brush across the canvas and leave the mark alone. That personal expressive swish may be the legacy of broken color. Not a bad contribution at that.
• Read Part 1 of this article: How the Impressionists introduced broken color to art...
