It was around 2002 that I decided to work exclusively in black and white.
I did that until about February of this year. Twenty years of shades of gray alone. My time in the wilderness with only carbon for pigment. My preferred medium was ink and brush. I will get around to posting some of that work, but here I post my first color piece in all that time.
It was not that I did not like color. It was that I had lost my way, and color had become an end itself while form — drawing, really — had dissolved. It took me that long to satisfy myself that I could still draw. And then, one day, after a quickly dashed image of a bit of garden, I noticed how much better it would be if I had a really bright, pretty yellow-green. So I went down to a local shop here in Fresno that carried quality inks in inventory, and I made friends with one of the sales people, and we went through swatches and bottles until I found the one Monteverde ink that really tingled my spine.
And then, of course, if you have this green you just love, well, you need a red. Or a pink. Or a magenta.
Blue, I had. I ran that in the Mont Blanc pen I used for writing. Sailor blue-black, actually. It was a signature, trademark color. Anyone seeing it would go, “Rick did that. He uses that blue. I recognize it.” People would ask to use that pen. I would tell them, “No.” {Meet “Rick the Dick.” No, you may not borrow my car; no, you may not use my pen.}
But that green! Thrilling!
And I needed a magenta then, as I said. And of course a yellow. We are talking inks that sell for fifteen, twenty a bottle. I stocked up.
I was not happy with the yellow. You really need two yellows, you know? One, that pale kind that cannot be mixed, another that golden ocher kind that can be mixed, but it’s a pain to do it without several other colors, and my palette was too limited to achieve that. This painting inaugurated my hunt for better yellows. I did find one; several, in fact. They are in my sunflower paintings, but that is another story. As is the purple hunt too, for just as green begs red, so does yellow beg purple. You will need a hot orange also, eventually. You can’t mix that one either. I found a good orange. You see how it is? As soon as you want color, it’s a gallery of tarted up strumpets, all wanting money before they will reveal themselves.
This painting, however, was done with those five inks alone: Blue-black, magenta, bright green, hot orange, and pale yellow. Tricky, the flesh tones, right?
Melanie took this photo of her and Isaac, my nephew, on some mountain. I forget where. California has lots of mountains. It does not matter. The hilarity matters. Their joie de vivre matters. The laughter is real because the wind was blowing their long hair all around hard enough to sting their faces! I loved the joy energy and immediately wanted to paint these beautiful young people with my new inks. Several I have shown this work to like it it above other more “finished” works. One said, “It’s like you’re on lead guitar, riffing, and we catch the edge of this thing you see, but this is really you.”
That was a nice thing to say, huh?
[image: Richard G Crockett, Isaac and Melanie In The Wind, colored ink on paper, 5×7, 23 January 2022]