Last week I shared the finished painting — The Beauty Of The Settting Sun, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches — and explained that it came not from a single photograph but from a composite of observed sunsets and several photographs accumulated across years.

This week I want to show you where it actually began.

This is the underpainting — the first stage of every serious oil painting I make. Raw umber and Payne's gray, applied thinly across the entire canvas, establishing the broad cloud masses, the horizon line, the dark foreground water, and the distribution of light and dark values that will govern every decision made afterward.

There is no color here. There is no warmth. There is no hint yet of the gold and orange cloud mass that will become the painting's emotional center. There is only structure — the painting's architecture, established before a single tube of warm color is opened.

Beginning painters almost universally want to skip this stage. They want to get to the color, the light, the drama. I understand that impulse completely. But the underpainting is not a preliminary exercise. It is the foundation on which everything else depends.

Here is what the underpainting establishes that color cannot fix later:

The value structure — where the darkest darks and lightest lights live in relation to each other. In this painting the darkest value is the foreground water and the deepest storm clouds. The lightest value is the top of the cumulus cloud formation in the upper left. Every other value in the painting falls between those two extremes. Getting that range established in the underpainting means every color decision afterward is made within a framework that already works.

The cloud masses — their shapes, their edges, the way they move across the sky. A cloud edge is not hard. It transitions from the cloud mass into the surrounding sky through a gradual softening that requires blending while the paint is wet. Establishing the cloud shapes in the underpainting gives me a map to follow when the color goes on.

The horizon line and the island or headland form in the middle distance. This dark low form — barely distinguishable from the water below it — is established in the underpainting as a simple flat shape. It will receive very little additional work in the finish stages. The underpainting is essentially the finish for that element.

What you are looking at in this photograph is a painting that already works in value. Everything that follows — the warm gold of the clouds, the green-gold light on the water, the dark storm cloud masses — is applied over a structure that is already compositionally sound.

Next week the warm colors arrive.

— Gorden McMurry, The Painting Physician
gordensoilpainting.com