Strength in Numbers: How to Create Emphasis Through Repetition
Learn how Maceo Mitchell’s sophisticated “color chorales” and compositions invite viewers into a world where complexity and simplicity coexist.
By Robert K. Carsten
New York City artist Maceo Mitchell came to invent the term “color chorales” to describe his multiple-image constructs while listening to the “Second Organ Chorale” by César Franck (Belgian, 1822-1890). “I always work to music in my studio. I love classical music — particularly the sounds of the organ. When I heard Franck’s piece, the feeling that I got corresponded to the feeling I was trying to express in my multiples,” says Mitchell.
There’s more than just strength in numbers, then, when the artist creates his arrangements of fruits, vegetables, spools of yarn, paper cups, bags, or funnels. A harmonic visual language inspired by an orchestral great is at work.
A Multitude of Comparisons
At a cursory glance, Mitchell’s highly sophisticated color chorales appear to be curiously repetitious. But the feeling he imbues into each work serves to lure the viewer into further study. His adept use of a multitude of comparisons, subtle color harmonies, contrasts and sequences, as well as individual variations of form create seemingly endless intrigue. Paintings, such as 42 Pears (below), exemplify this phenomenon.
Mitchell began his career as an artist with a master’s degree in printmaking from the University of Iowa. He then became a graphic artist, working often in black and white with pencil. After returning to his hometown of Detroit, he secured a job teaching at a community college, where he taught basic drawing and life drawing and continued to develop his skills in those areas.
The Science of Color
Then, the department head, who was persuaded that artists could teach any aspect of the field, assigned Mitchell a class in color and design. “I couldn’t talk him out of it,” says Mitchell. “So, saddled with this class, I decided it was a good idea to take a crash course in the subject myself. I went to the library and got every book I could find on color theory.”
Mitchell describes the experience of learning new principles just one step ahead of his students as a science project; the art classroom was the lab and his students were conducting the experiments on his behalf.
As time went by, Mitchell developed a love for color theory. “The more I saw what could be done, the more confident I became. I began to understand the principles and how they work,” he says. “We worked mostly in gouache and did abstract designs.”
Formal Designs
Eventually, Mitchell and his wife, the noted illustrator and artist Patricia J. Wynne, decided to relocate to New York City. “Then I was on my own, no longer having students to carry out these experiments in color for me,” says Mitchell. The artist began drawing in colored pencil — an economic choice that fit his budget at the time.
“I needed a subject that was inexpensive and available, and that was fruit and vegetables. So for years I did typical still life arrangements in colored pencil and watercolor,” he says. “One day I found a set of cheap pastels in my studio. I don’t know where they came from; maybe they just drifted down from heaven. I tried them and must have liked them because I bought more and also bought Daniel Greene’s book, Pastel [Watson-Guptill, 1985].”
A Forgiving Medium
At the time, Mitchell was showing work in several media, but pastel began to take over. “I was having the most commercial success in this medium, but it wasn’t just that,” he says. “I found the colors to be extremely rich and easy to blend. Pastel could be pushed around and was very forgiving in that I could make changes easily. Soon I switched to La Carte paper, which made it even easier and more fun to work with. And soon too, my interest in color and design resurfaced. But rather than continuing what I had my students doing previously, I decided to introduce fruit and vegetables in place of abstract or symmetric shapes like Josef Albers [German-born American, 1888- 1976] had done.”
Painting Multiples
Mitchell began by arranging his apples and oranges in a more formal setup. “One day I came up with an idea and did what became a prototype for my multiples,” he says. “I had a big piece of illustration board and divided it into 18 or 20 squares or rectangles and I did different fruit in each of them. I liked it except I was constantly cleaning pastel dust from the board. That led me to doing the same thing but cutting individual pieces of La Carte for each of the windows in the mat.”
For a while, the artist was painting multiples with different fruit and color combinations on the same-sized paper, which he then matted and framed together as one piece. From there, he graduated to doing the same type of fruit using the same colors (see 20 Goldens on Red above), which eventually evolved into works such as The Blue and the Gray wherein he has different values of the same color in the background, sometimes arranged from light to dark.
“This was just another extension of my idea — the concept of making it a more formal design,” he says. “Mixing up the fruit and backgrounds in the beginning lent a flashy look. But what I’m doing now, I think, is more subtle and interesting. It has more depth and is more rewarding personally. I don’t ever think of these as works of still life. They’re formal designs using real objects instead of circles or squares.”
Portrait of a Pear
Mitchell begins with an idea — Bosc pears, for example — and next decides how many he’s going to paint. Sometimes it’s the overall size of the piece that determines this amount. Storage of very large works, the size limit of matboard and the weight of glass are also factors. Then he cuts all of the pieces of La Carte. “If there are 42 pieces, I’ll buy 42 pears,” says Mitchell. “This comes out of a conscious decision not to get into the habit of drawing exactly the same thing over and over again.”
The artist truly enjoys drawing and tends to think that viewers are more drawn to the artwork, as opposed to the subject matter, for that reason. “I think of each fruit I paint as an individual portrait,” he says. “Each pear, for example, although of the same variety, will have a slightly different shape and that lends character to the overall piece. I pretty much try to reproduce what I see, which makes my work naturalistic.”
Jean Baptiste Chardin (French, 1699-1779) is an artist Mitchell greatly admires for his naturalism. “I love the look of his individual objects,” he says. “I could say my work is realistic, but realism covers too much ground. There are a lot of things that are realistic that don’t look like my work.”
The Pastel Process
Mitchell usually does a rough sketch to determine which background color is going to work. If it’s blue, as in the case of 42 Pears, he’ll determine the different steps of value. Then he’ll sketch the pears in charcoal pencil, doing what he calls a “cartoon” of the subject, which is basically just an outline with a little shading.
He paints each one as a finished work before moving on to the next. “Usually, I work from hard to soft beginning with either Nupastels or Rembrandts before moving on to any number of soft pastels such as Unison, Great American Artworks, Schmincke and Girault,” he says. “I’ll finish the top row and then do the second row to completion. When they’re all done, I arrange them row-by-row to make a cohesive whole.”
The artist might do some adjusting at this point, and before bringing the finished works to his framer, he marks each one on the back with row and number and also makes a separate sheet indicating the overall layout.
Emphasis Through Repetition
20 Goldens on Red is an example of a painting in which variation is effectively narrowed to the specifics of the fruit, lighting and positioning of each subject. Mitchell selects a color that will harmonize with the fruit. For any of his color chorales, Mitchell could have painted just one fruit, but he thought multiples would make a more emphatic statement. “By not changing the value of the red I tried to emphasize that color by repeating it,” he says.
While still using reiteration for emphasis, the artist sometimes uses very limited value or hue changes to enhance the character or mood of a piece, as evidenced in the background of The Blue and the Gray, for example.
Both emphasis and variation resonate consistently throughout another vein of the artist’s work that he terms “lineups.” Whether the vegetables appear to float in linear fashion as in Many Peppers or are resting on a surface that rhymes in color as in Five and a Half Radishes (top of article), Mitchell is always mining the figure/ground relationships for intensity of expression.
Rarified Space
The more one looks at Mitchell’s pastels, the more one realizes they’re not really about their subjects. Instead, they’re about compounding visual effects. They seem to exist to allow the viewer to enter into that rarified space where complexity and simplification cohabitate; where order and balance, rhythm and pattern simultaneously resound.
The echoes of form and color speak far more of the depth and vastness of the territory the artist regularly explores than of mere redundancy. The strength of these forms is reinforced considerably by each object’s autonomy and by the artist’s intermingling of color theory. Through systematic studies of color and the order he imposes upon his artistic process, Mitchell is able to restate, over and over, the power of limits. His designs, within regulated parameters, are never tethered by concept or theory. Rather, his accomplishments are fueled by both the practice of color theory and his remarkably innovative spirit.
Meet the Artist
Maceo Mitchell is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s prestigious printmaking department, where he studied with Mauricio Lasansky. The Detroit native now lives in New York City with his wife, artist Patricia Wynne. His work has been exhibited in France, Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Learn more about Mitchell and see more of his work at maceoarts.com and on his Instagram page, @maceo.mitchell.
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