Mixing Colorful Grays in Oil

The Tunny Catch, Ayamonte Oil Joaquin Sorolla

Joaquin Sorolla was reported to have remarked upon his color methods the importance of the grays. What he may have meant is that the largest percentage of any painting consists of the middle values, not the highlights or accents, and those values are by definition grayer than either of the former. When he used the word gray, he didn’t mean some mixture of white and black. He meant sophisticated mixtures of complementary and secondary colors—colorful grays. Sorolla knew those mixes by heart and employed them with speed and skill to create his masterpieces. Sorolla, along with his contemporaries, John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn, stood at the apex of hundreds of years of learning, training and practice in representational painting in Europe. The skills they employed in their work were passed to them by a previous generation of acknowledged masters of painting, as they themselves had been taught. Looking in any maj…