As a visiting artist researcher at
Tate Britain, TONY SMIBERT has
spent years studying the work of
JMW TURNER. Here he shows you
how to recreate his rich coloursP
arry together shapes,
tones, lines, marks, textures
and, above all, colours,
to create arrangements we then
describe as compositions – just
as composers of music do when
arranging musical notes. The English
Romantic painter JMW Turner was a
virtuoso, particularly in colour, with
all its glowing richness.
At the heart of his system was the
studied placement of warm and cool
colours next to and within each other.
No painting better illustrates his use
of colour than Venice: Looking across
the Lagoon at Sunset. The sky is a
warm panel of colour above a coolpanel of water below. The glowing
warmth of an evening sky is
strengthened with a deeper warm at
the lower left, while the cool blue of
the sea is strengthened with a deeper
cool tone just below the horizon on
the right. Warm clouds in the upper
sky have been cooled slightly with
blue, and the fishermen’s pier and
mooring posts painted using a deeper
mix of warm and cool. Consequently,
they ‘communicate’ visually, linking
sky and sea. Meanwhile, where the sky
and water meet, a distant landform
stretches, also painted in a colour that
draws on cool and warm. The colour
harmonies are simple, yet complex.The exercise that follows will give
you experience in some of the ways
that Turner used colour. The aim is
not to be imitating his brushwork or
other techniques, but rather his
colour, light and tonal principles.
Because it is tiny, this watercolour
exercise won’t take long.
Later on, if you choose, it will help
you to attempt more complex works,
or to make studies direct from
Turner’s own colour beginnings.
In the charts of exercises [top right],
the sketches are all quite tiny –
deliberately so – because the idea
is to experiment quickly, identify
techniques, and move on.Tu ner’s
P lette
ABOVE Turner’s
Venice: Looking
across the
Lagoon at Sunset
surrounded by
Tony’s own rapid
colour studiesCOLOUR THEORY