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Monday, September 12, 2011

Torrit Gray...in praise of neutrals

I am in love.  With Torrit Gray.  No, not a guy... a paint from Gamblin.

I am a value painter.  But I do appreciate neutrals a great deal, especially when laid next to pures and sparkling brights.  I have always mixed my own grays.  It is usually quite an ordeal, searching for a particular neutral nuance, while adding and adding and subtracting with my palette knife.  This summer I found in my color box a promotional tube of Torrit Gray from Gamblin.  I have absolutely no idea where it came from.  But I now hail its unexpected arrival.  Because it is such a beautiful gray, in my opinion, I found myself simply mixing the pure hue of my choice to get it to lean in a particular direction.  The tube says " In honor of Earth Day, we make this oil color from recycled pigments collected by our air filtration system".  Wow.

There is a special link on the Gamblin site that explains this pigment and its making.  I found it fascinating.

Torrit Gray is quite a guy.

Here’s the secret of being a great colorist: it doesn’t matter how well you combine the bright, obvious colors, it’s the so-called dull, closely related shades - gray-greens, pewters, tans, muted browns, umbers, ochres, stormy blues and charcoals - that determines whether you have an eye for color.

Dorothy Shinn, April 14, 2005 review of Yves Saint-Laurent, Akron Beacon Journal