Glen Span Arch & Philosophical Stupidity

Today I went up to W 103rd street in Central Park, over to Glen Span Arch.
I last painted here in December 2009 in my beginner days of plein air.

This time I stood on top of the waterfall and painted the view through the arch.

I HIGHLY recommend standing on top of a waterfall to paint.  The soothing waterfall sound goes well with a really good audio book- in my current situation a wonderful series of Medieval Medical Murder Mysteries by Mel Starr.

Temp today was 35 degrees and we are getting a storm in around 4-5pm, and I am always losing daylight, so I was intent on working and finishing. Around halfway through the painting a man came over and asked if I speak Spanish.  I speak a lot of Spanish but am not fluent.

But it was enough to get through this conversation... I thought he would ask for directions like everyone else. But no- he is also a painter and he came all the way over to my spot, inquired about my Spanish just to tell me..... I shouldn't use black.

He showed me his VERY high-chroma paintings and said "he studied".

And he must have informed me three or 4 times- including while he was walking away- "Don't use black!"

WHAT THE FUCK. HOW RUDE.

You do not go up to someone who is working and tell them how to do their job.

And yeah there's a big thing about not using black for some people, because of some teaching philosophy that keeps getting passed down in color theory.  It comes from the impressionists, or peoples' interpretation of impressionists, who were more concerned with color than with value.

I have also heard it from some teachers. In fact, I was a No Black person for a while just because that's what a teacher said and it actually held me back.  Its a really weird RULE OF ART that people adhere to religiously without even really knowing why, or they think if you use black you don't know what you are doing and your colors will look bad or some such crap.

I think it's to sound like they have some kind of artistic superiority or something.

They have TRAINING.

So do I!

I love black.

It's an essential color on my palette.

I know how and why I use it.

it's a technical decision. this painting took 2 hours total painting time not including setup and breakdown. I don't have TIME to fuss around with making chromatic blacks and they also don't get as dark compared to a good ivory or mars black. Besides, I require a very neutral gray because I mix a bunch of them and tint them. I need black for that. There are something like 7 colors in the bridge.

I took a note from Monet for this panting- instead of my usual ultramarine gray mix for the sky I used a violet gray mix.  I think it worked well and I'm going to play around with this more.

You know who else used black?

Sargent

Rembrandt

Vermeer

Hals

Zorn

Dan Gerhartz

Everyone

In fact the basic student palette is black, yellow ochre and earth red.

If it's good enough for Sargent, it's certainly good enough for me.

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