Spent two hours mixing a grey and got nothing but mud
I am painting a corner of my studio in the late afternoon light and it is beating me. The wall on the left is a cold grey, the wall behind is a warm grey, and the floor throws a third grey up into both. Three greys, all different, all related. I should be able to mix this. I have been mixing greys for twenty five years.
Today: burnt umber and ultramarine, too purple. Raw umber and white, dead. Ivory black and yellow ochre, chalk. I added a hair of viridian and made it worse. Six piles of mud on the palette by eleven o'clock, and the light had already moved on. The corner that was so beautiful at nine was gone.
The annoying part is I know what the mistake is. I am mixing the grey I think the wall is instead of the grey I actually see. My head has an idea about what a grey wall looks like and my hand keeps reaching for it. Two hours of painting my idea instead of the thing.
Tomorrow I'll scrape the whole corner back to the ground and start with clean, cool, no preconception. Bof. Easy to say tonight with a glass of wine in my hand.
Cadmium prices are one thing. Losing a morning to my own stubbornness is another.
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The problem is you are chasing a grey that does not exist as a pigment. Three greys, three different light sources hitting them, and the light is moving while you mix. No pile of paint is going to sit still and be all three.
I do this with smalti, and the trick in mosaic is the same as in painting: you do not mix the grey, you place the greys next to each other and let the eye do it. Two or three slightly wrong neighbours and the corner reads exactly right from where you are standing. My teachers called it the dance of the tesserae, and it drove me mad for years before it made sense.
The burnt umber and ultramarine going purple is the one that would have annoyed me most. Purple grey is such a specific kind of wrong. Try it with a touch of raw umber in it. That said, you know your corner better than I do, and twenty five years of anything means your eye has already solved it even if your palette has not caught up yet.
The light moved on, so the painting is not lost. It just moved somewhere you cannot reach until tomorrow. Annoying, but that is the corner's fault, not yours. 🙂
You are right about the pigment that doesn't exist, and it's an annoying truth to be handed at eleven in the morning. But in mosaic you have the advantage of the tesserae being fixed, the light still moves over them but the pieces don't. In oil the whole surface is one wet mess, so the "neighbours" I place at ten o'clock have physically merged with each other by two. That's the part your dance doesn't have to survive.
I think what you're really telling me is to stop trying to make one pile be the corner, which is fair. I've been loading the palette instead of the canvas. Maybe I break the three greys into their own laid-in passages and only touch them when they've set a little.
Smalti though, I don't envy you. Paint at least forgives you with a rag.