Fall Changes and a Rant About Pigments

November 2025

Fall is a good time for change, for bringing in resources to nourish your roots. Time to gather, rest and reflect in the winter, so you can move forward in the spring. 

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The big change for me is that I’m moving out of Project Space, my Talent, OR studio/gallery/classroom since 2016. November 30 is my official end date. I’ve been preparing for a month - simplifying and culling objects to make room in my home studio for everything I want to keep and store.  It’s an invigorating process. Making space feels GOOD. I was feeling stuck early this year. My energy felt diluted. I spent time taking stock of my work life. I realized I prefer working from home and Project Space, while a place I loved, is underused. Once I realized this, it was easy to let it go and move forward.

Happily artists Donna Ruiz and Heather Ayers Flood are taking Project Space over, keeping the name and making it their own. They both live in Talent and I think they will be a vital anchor for the Talent art scene. I’m so grateful that the little space, started by Megan MacDonell and I in 2016, will live on. Megan chose the name and worked with Ron Hodgdon, a Talent resident who suddenly died this past year, to design the logo. It feels really fitting that Project Space with it’s logo and mission will live on. Amazing!

Megan MacDonell and me (Sarah Burns) circa 2016

I am moving the art exhibition portion of my work across the street to The Talent Gallery.  I’ll deliver this body of artwork next for my inaugural exhibit. There is an opening November 28, and the work will be up for December and January.

I chose this collection because they all share a common earthy, warm color palette for fall.

I love earth colors. They are largely overlooked. Most of us are initially very attracted to high chroma, modern colors. But earth colors have extraordinary staying power. The renaissance is built mostly on earth colors. Cave paintings are made with earth colors.  Earth colors have been used in every part of the globe.  There is a weight and majesty to earth colors that no other colors compare to. 

Yet many artists don’t have many, or any, earth colors on their palettes.  There is an arts education myth that you could mix better neutrals by using two color “opposites”. This method drives me crazy because it changes the color you’re mixing too dramatically.  If you want to lower the chroma of a color it’s SO much easier to grab a lower chroma version of the same color and gently add that to the high chroma version. There are earth colors in nearly every hue, so it’s super easy to use them to adjust other higher chroma pigments. 

Being able to clearly define Hue, Value and Chroma is the first step toward being able to handle color well in your paintings.

This is an elegant solution for so many reasons. Besides being a gentle and more manageable way to adjust color, it’s cheaper. Earth colors are generally inexpensive and are less fugitive than higher chroma pigments.  To me it’s a no-brainer. 

It's also a fun challenge to play with earth colors when you know that color is relative - meaning - colors change depending on what they’re placed next to. 

The appearance of colors can change depending on what colors they are placed next to. Josef Albers shows many examples like this in his book.

From Interaction of Color

by Josef Albers

I learned a lot of this from one of my favorite painting teachers, Ben Fenske. He gave us the exercise commonly known as the Zorn Palette , where artists use just four colors - white, red, yellow ochre and black, in order to mix as many colors as possible. The idea is that a limited palette will help you learn to get the most out of your pigments. You learn what’s really necessary. You learn to focus more on value and shifts of warm and cool. You learn to limit your mixes. Artists from past centuries didn’t have the vast number of high chroma colors that we have now and they could still created impactful work. If artists today train themselves to understand color better, they can gain control of what can be a very unwieldy, overwhelming and confusing amount of color. In fact access to high chroma pigments hasn't helped everyone!

Anders Zorn

This self portait, which shows four colors on Zorn’s palette - Lead white, Yellow Ochre, Vermillion and Ivory Black inspires thousands of artists to do a painting exercise today referred to as “Zorn Palette”. This painting can easily be made with just these four colors. Many artists today swap lead white for titanium white and vermillion (made with mercury) with cadmium red light.

One of the biggest takeaways I had from the “Zorn Palette” exercises was that Ivory Black plus White creates blue, which in the absence of a higher chroma blue, looks very blue! (If you use Titanium White, the blue effect is even stronger.)

These paintings don’t use any actual blue pigment, but rely on ivory black plus titanium white, surrounded by warm colors to create the illusion of a higher chroma blue. This is so much fun to play with!

So anyway - I digress. Don’t get me started. But do come see the new show! Paintings can be purchased on TheTalentGallery.art after November 28, 2025.

Rye Whiskey and Beer, oil on linen, 42” x 42”, 2020, Sarah F Burns