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Sunday, July 1, 2012

Beach Roses, Fog and a Secret Ingredient!


Beach Roses, 9x12, oil

It's now July, and that means beach roses.  They've already been blooming for weeks, but soon they'll really start to explode.  Yesterday, I went out to paint roses as part of the final Plein Air Painters of the Bay of Fundy paintout.

Although many places in the U.S. are suffering triple-digit temperatures - it hit 106 at my sister's house in Georgia - on Campobello I don't think it even hit 80.  That's still warm for us here.  But these warm days, coming before the ocean has a chance to heat up, can create fog.  As I drove out, I kept my eye on a wall of it that seemed to sit just off the coast.

Liberty Point, which you can see from the Lower Duck Pond, was keeping the fog at bay, so I had a clear view of my roses.  But as I finished up, the wind suddenly shifted and the fog rolled in.  The temperature must have dropped 15 degrees.

As many of you know, I use a split-primary palette in the field.  It's hard to come up with a proper "beach rose red" with it.  White with alizarin crimson makes a color that is a very rough approximation.  What I do in this case is do what I can with my field palette and then  head for the studio.  Once I'm back, I pull out my secret ingredient:  Thio Violet.  This intensely-pigmented color (PR122) from Grumbacher is pretty close, and it only takes a few dabs, mixed with white, over the roses I painted in the field.  I added a little of it into the beach gravel, too, to unify the painting.

I use secret ingredients in all my flowers.  The split-primary palette doesn't really do justice to most gardens.  But I have a hoard of odd, tubed colors back in the studio.  Among them are some great high-chroma colors for flowers.