Cecilia Beaux, Finding the Right Tone

"Autoportrait" by Cecilia Beaux

Cecilia Beaux wrote: "After a separation of nearly nineteen months, the great emotion and happiness of return [to my family] was in finding them all there. The little ones were larger and the older unaltered, to my perception. My uncle helped me to find a studio, and very soon I was undertaking new projects in painting, the next five years being very busy ones.

The painter in question, me, must now deal with actuality, and in no way tentatively. She did know that she had little power over her palette - that is, the color upon it, its substance, and what should be its power of connecting up with what was planned to appear on the canvas. After all - she had not learned to paint.  

Some way must be found to make the obstinate mess on the palette something which, lifted by the brush, might prove to be 'right' when placed where it belonged on the canvas. Chance seemed to offer a sort of approach to a simple solution. This was in trying pastel as means to an end. 

I greatly enlarged my pastel collection, spending much time in choosing shades which were not primary colors, which of course I already had. To work with them, I used a light tray, covering it with a piece of white cloth, to show the tone of the pastels, and also to prevent them from mixing. 

The secret of the procedure lay in the fact that I must know the tone I desired, and then strive to find it. The value of this lay in the fact, also, that the color tried and proved to be right was generally strangely unlike what it appeared to be in my hand. This, as teaching and for developing a faculty, was far more valuable than its use as permanent means of expression.

Also, I remembered a small circumstance during my first days under the criticism of William Sartain. One day, he took my dirty little palette, and without the slightest hesitation picked up on a brush what I would have seen as a bit of mud. Laid upon the half tone, generally one of the most resistant of passages, it proved to be pure, sustaining and perfect in sequence. Recognition of tone on the palette - this, the fragile medium pastel, by the separateness and individuality of its already existent tones (which positively were or were not 'right'), taught choice and strict rejection."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Background with Figures" by Cecilia Beaux.)