The value of values

Well having approached the subject of value in the last post lets us now consider the - to my mind - crucial role that it plays in constructing a painting.
First though a little word about terminology. One of the things that bedevils talk about art is the lack of precision in the terms employed. Here I shall describe the three properties of colour by the terms employed under the Munsell system ie hue, value and chroma. In this post I am concentrating on the second of these, value which  (sometimes, but not here, is called tone) by which is  meant the lightness or darkness of a colour on the greyscale. A picture printed in black and white is actually various levels of value and  zero chroma ie grey. Now every touch of paint on a canvas has to have all three elements to it, it has a hue, a value and a chroma and to enjoy looking at a painting it is not really necessary to think of them in seperate terms,  but to design a painting it is absolutely crucial.

From a distance of a few yards the most obvious thing about the construction of a picture is its value pattern, that is to say, the distribution of lights and darks. Obviously there needs to be a certain amount of variety otherwise the picture would be literally monotonous but it is crucial that one value, or small range of values, makes its presence felt as the dominant value against which the other values are felt as relief. The most obvious instance perhaps is the traditional portrait, a light face against a dark background, the 'background' usually accounting for perhaps 3/4 of the surface area against which the light head is all the more dramatic. Even outside portraits though artists have tended to use the entire range of values within a picture. The paintings of artists such as Rembrandt and Caravaggio for example depend almost entirely for their visual impact on strongly contrasting values but even more modern artists working in natural light employ the same device.


Look at this painting by John Singer Sargent of the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. The majority of the picture is a high value - the Munsell scale runs from 0 black to 10 white although both extremes are only theoretical and can't actually be reached by paint- so we can say about 75% of this picture is about value 7 or 8. Notice how carefully he controls his lights to make them read as a single shape.

On a line pleasing placed about 2/3 up the picture the foliage, intersected by the male figure gives a dark shape at about value 2 and again notice how all the different elements are tied together to make one dark shape, even the red flowers whilst not quite so low in value are close enough to read as part of the darks. This is even clearer to see if we remove all the colour and look at a simple greyscale image as below:

Thus we can see how Sargent has grouped his lights and darks to make a coherent but lively whole. The majority of the drama and interest of this picture depends on the value structure, it doesn't lose a lot by being converted into a black and white image, the colour enhances it but its like adding salt to a cooking, salt will enhance the flavour of a good dish but no amount of the stuff will make tripe taste like steak.

The importance of a good value structure is affirmed by the fact that most classically trained artists did, and still do, make value studies before turning to the problem of colour, the foundations have to be solid before you start worrying about the decoration of the walls. And then just to make doubly sure the usual method of proceeding was to paint the whole picture in monochrome before then going on to add the colour.

Above is a photograph of Lord Leighton's picture 'Captive Andromache' at the monochrome stage to illustrate.

Of course the tonal structure of a painting does not need to be so dramatic as the examples above that I have talked about where pretty much the full range of values have been used to create a powerfully contrasting image. But the important thing to remember is that the value pattern sets the key for the picture. In other words if you want drama and excitement you have to establish it with value and then you can follow with strongly contrasting hues and chromas if desired but no amount of high chroma colour will give the same sense of drama without the basis of strong value contrasts to rest upon.

Before this post gets too long we will close by looking at a very different use of value to create the very opposite of drama. This is a painting called 'Topaz' by Albert Moore who was concerned very much with actually eliminating all drama from his painting to produce work of which the form and content were combined expressively to produce a mood of contemplation

Above we see the picture reduced to the greyscale and how different it is from the Sargent. At first sight perhaps it looks a little on the monotonous side but if you squint (which tends to reduce the image to the main value ares by eliminating small variations) you begin to see a very subtle pattern of high values anchored by lower values at almost musically spaced intervals around the heads, arms and feet of the figures tied together by the darker values of the shadows in the drapery. I hope you will agree that despite the lack of clashing contrasts we saw earlier it still makes a very pleasing whole, but one with a quiet reflective contemplative mood which echoes the ostensible subject of the painting. With the addition of some appropriately subtle and delicate colour notes the picture appears in all its glory, and as Swinburne said of another work by Moore, 'its meaning is beauty and its reason for being is to be'