Limiting The Color Palette

Over the years, Cara Brown has refined her color palette to create more cohesive paintings

The way I see it, there are at least two facets to an artist’s relationship with color.

First there is a love affair. Those of us who use vibrant color in our paintings are likely to be smitten by it. Viewing and being surrounded by color is nourishment to me—I can’t imagine living in a black-and-white world. Color conveys emotion and energy; it is mysterious and very personal. Color is life.

Second, making paintings requires an artist to work with color in a very practical way. Interpreting what I see in the physical world and in my reference images into paintings means I need an understanding of my materials— notably paints and pigments. The color that ends up in my paintings is based on my choosing, combining, mixing and layering paint.

When I began painting in watercolor I collected tubes of paint based on recommendations by my workshop teachers or art instruction books as well as those that appealed to me in art stores or mail-order catalogs. If I liked it, I bought it. I documented this initial collection in a painted “inventory” that included 61 different tubes! Limiting the paints to use in my paintings wasn’t in the realm of my imagination for a long time.

I still don’t limit myself too much. My current watercolor palette has 32 wells— all filled, plus blobs of additional paints in the corners here and there. Today, I mostly don’t plan the colors that I’ll use in a painting. I start out with whichever colors strike me in the moment and end up with a selection of about a dozen different paints for a given painting. The paints that end up in that selection are based solely on my intuition. But in recent years I’ve made the decision— before I sit to paint—that I’d limit myself to a specific set of paints. In one painting, it was only three paints.