There's a color I've been trying to mix for three weeks. I can see it clearly — it lives somewhere between a warm grey and a faded violet, with something almost green underneath. It's the color of old linen left in a room with north-facing windows.
It doesn't exist in any tube I own.
The Problem With Reference
Most color mixing starts with reference. You look at what you're painting, you identify the colors, you mix toward them. This is a reasonable approach. It works for most things.
But sometimes the color you're after isn't in front of you. It's in your memory, or your imagination, or some combination of both. You're mixing toward something you can only half-see.
The surface and texture has been a good place to think through this — the relationship between what you observe and what you imagine. I've been reading about how painters in the Flemish tradition would sometimes mix colors from memory, working from a mental image rather than a physical reference. The results were often stranger and more interesting than what direct observation would have produced.
The Process of Approximation
What I've been doing is approximation. I mix something close, hold it up to the light, compare it to the image in my head, and adjust. The adjustment is never quite right. The next mix is closer. Or it's further away in a different direction.
This is frustrating in a way that's also productive. The frustration keeps you honest. You can't convince yourself you've arrived when you clearly haven't.
I've been working on this at this studio, and I've been sharing some of the process with the creative community — the community of people who are also chasing colors they can't quite name. There's something reassuring about that. The chase is the practice.
What You Find on the Way
The interesting thing about mixing toward an imagined color is what you find on the way. Last week I mixed something that wasn't the color I was after but was exactly right for a different part of the painting I hadn't started yet. I set it aside. I'll use it.
The color I'm actually looking for might not exist. It might be a composite of several colors that can only exist in sequence, not simultaneously. That's fine. The search is teaching me things about the painting that I wouldn't have learned any other way.
Sometimes the destination is a decoy. The color in the world I took last spring had a moment like this — I was looking for one thing and found something better. Color works the same way.