My first memory was blue. I was born on September 18, 1965, in Myrtle Beach, and in December of that year my parents took me by overnight train from Florence, SC (the closest station), to New York City. I remember staring at a blue nightlight in our sleeper car. My childhood was ablaze in color. As a toddler, I held my maternal grandfather’s finger as he led me around his huge backyard awash in pink azaleas every March. We didn’t have a lot to say (he couldn’t speak English, and I couldn’t speak at all), but the flowers didn’t mind. Spero Michael Bogache was born in Albania and left his family behind to come through Ellis Island in 1920 with waves of immigrants seeking a better life; he had his first shave in America. How Pop-Pop loved his flowers. He guided my tiny hand across their petals and took us places words can’t go. Then I’d plunge my entire head into the blossoms and open my eyes wide to burn their raucous color into my retina.
I am the product of one place with two faces. Myrtle Beach is a resort town full of amusement parks and arcades buzzing with neon signs and blinking candy- colored lights, surrounded by some of the most ravishing formal gardens on the East Coast. There is transcendent beauty in the slow-moving water of Lowcountry rivers, but artificial landscapes rinsed in nickel and neon are equally as beautiful; when my family says, “Let’s get back to nature,” it means book a trip to Vegas. My love affair with Las Vegas is an extension of my affection for Myrtle Beach. Both are places in which nature and artifice crash head on into each other at breakneck speed, secreting a liquid that is bright and combustible. The fullness and amplitude of my resort upbringing gave me a deep love for excess; moderation simply isn’t in my vocabulary. As the South Carolina painter J. Bardin once told me, “Sometimes too much is just right.”
The term “Lowcountry” originally referred to the prehistoric seacoast, or Sandhills, of South Carolina, which spanned the width of the state from Aiken to Chesterfield counties. The Upcountry was everything above the Sandhills. Today, Lowcountry refers to coastal regions, from Georgetown to Beaufort, including sea islands like St. Helena, Edisto, Fripp, Kiawah, and Port Royal. The richness of place permeates the South Carolina Lowcountry and is woven inextricably into her history, folklore, and commerce. The Romantic painter Washington Allston was born in Georgetown, SC, forty minutes south of where I was raised. He wrote of how he “delighted in being terrified by the tales of witches and hags,” referring to the same tangled woods I explored as a kid. My college roommate was born and raised in McClellanville, a small shrimping village fifty minutes north of Charleston. One summer, he led me deep into the woods to visit his relatives in a nearby Gullah community, descendants of slaves who worked on the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia. We drove down a dirt road to a dead end and then walked beside a river flowing black as typewriter ink; decaying tree trunks peeking from waterlogged shadows like gargoyles made the familiar appear alien. Cobalt-blue bottles tinkled in branches overhead, put there to ward off wooly boogers (hairy monsters that live deep in the Southern woods) who, attracted to the light refracting through the glass, became trapped and vaporized in the morning sun. Blue is thought to repel evil spirits, which is why porch ceilings down south are often painted the color of sky. I still think of those bottles when I use bright blue.
I use bright colors because they’re available. Twentieth-century hues like pthalo green, quinacridone magenta, and Hansa yellow have high tinting strength and can be quite intense. However, the key to using bright colors effectively is knowing how to use dull ones. Adding bright color is like turning a radio up a little at a time; you don’t realize how loud it is until you turn it down. Dull colors are like turning the radio down. I spent decades practicing with tertiaries, even studying the gray muck in the bottom of my paint thinner bucket because it feels like the gooey pluff mud that I marinated in for the first eighteen years of my life. Mud always fascinated me, and I whipped up mud pies better than any kid in school, but I never got the memo that you couldn’t eat them. Oil paint is just organized dirt, and I’ve tasted that too.
The Lowcountry wore softer palettes. My love affair with the color of oysters began at an early age. At low tide, their shells, delicate as pastry, cupped shallow puddles of salt water and pale mud. I’d lie on my stomach examining their color, just a breath of itself, and imagine swimming in their palm-sized oceans. Decades later, I realized this wasn’t the daydreaming of a child, but the mechanics of how a painter sees the world. Scale and logic evaporate, replaced by a new reality that is bright and capricious. There isn’t a color more beautiful than that of an oyster shell. Well, maybe that of a glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut.
My list of great colorists probably overlaps with yours (Fra Angelico, Pontormo, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Hans Hofmann, and Josef Albers), so I won’t focus on a stupid top-ten list. However, I learn just as much from lesser-known artists like Samuel Peploe, F.H. Varley, Karl Benjamin, Spencer Gore, Goodridge Roberts, Joseph Solman, Sonia Delaunay, and Bob Thompson. I never begin with a preconceived color plan but mix and juxtapose unexpected combinations right on the canvas until a family, usually three colors, starts to suggest a mood, much like Edwin Dickinson’s “color spots,” in which he would apply one tone next to another, gradually building color space. Through trial and error, I discovered certain color pairings that I stick with, such as purple/green, brown/blue, teal/orange, and red/gray. I keep several palettes going simultaneously and mix large amounts of one color in a range of tones on each palette. I also have one palette with small blobs of color arranged in the order of the spectrum. Plastic Chinese food containers are ideal for mixing.
Although I painted in acrylics early in my career, I am an oil painter. Oil colors are transparent, semitransparent, or opaque. Transparents such as alizarin crimson or pthalo green are fat (high oil content), while opaques like cadmium red or cerulean blue are lean (low oil content). Titanium white is opaque and is the whitest white, while zinc white is semitransparent and good for glazing. Black is a highly versatile color, and I am always suspicious of teachers who advise against using it. Diego Velázquez used black—end of discussion. I prefer ivory black (semitransparent) and mars black (opaque), both of which have warm tints perfect for dirtying other colors. Mars black mixed with alizarin crimson makes a black cherry color and, when mixed with lemon yellow, produces a gorgeous dull green.
At first glance my paintings appear to have every color imaginable. The human eye can detect more than seven million variations, but the more you look you will see that they operate chromatically within a small orbit of a few carefully chosen hues. It’s never about individual colors but how they vibrate together: purple appears more intense when placed near yellow or green. Vincent van Gogh kept a red Chinese lacquered box on his worktable in which he stored balls of colored yarn that were woven in multiple combinations to help him visualize what brushstrokes might look like on a canvas. His pal Émile Bernard noted their “unexpected interlacing tonalities” in which colors in combination produced greater effect than individually. A good place to experiment with color juxtapositions is in the house paint section of your local hardware store. Try moving the little color sample swatches around in various combinations—just don’t get caught.
The key to color is to try everything without scrutiny. Just play. You can’t think color; you have to see it. I’ve never taken a color theory class in my life but rely on direct observation and practice. Color is communication. It can stir our deepest emotions, create a sense of spaciousness, and momentarily distract us from the unstoppable advance of time with sheer visual delight. However, you don’t learn color from books; you have to monkey around with it on your palette, put a blob next to another blob, and see how they look together. Work across the image rather than on top of it. In other words, don’t labor over parts, but work the whole field; if you put a dab of cobalt blue in one spot, move it to the opposite side swiftly, without analysis. Do, then think.
The director Arthur Penn said that every day on set he made one decision that changed the entire film. He just didn’t know which one. By doing first and thinking second, I have assembled an unusual and personal palette. Some combinations work and others fail, but all it takes is one good decision and the entire painting hums. The secret is to pay attention.