Luděk Marold: From Black and White to Color

Many of the illustrations by Luděk Marold (Czech 1865-1898) use black and white watercolor on a gray or tan board. That's a technique we're experimenting with, so let's see how he does it.

He uses the black transparently when painting the easel and the sculpture stand. He saves the opaque white for the window. The top planes of the dress are painted in semi-transparent white.

He uses white, black, and gray in varying degrees of opacity, letting the drawing show through in the figures. The warm tones of the board show up in all the leftover spaces.

Wonderful use of foreground elements.

Festive party scene, dark hats over light area, above that light lanterns against dark. The blank area in the lower part of the picture make the busy detail decipherable.

Classic male/ female discussion, but look at what he chooses to show and what he leaves to our imaginations.

The white is spotted selectively. The rest of the modeling is mostly done in transparent gray, but there seems to be a little white and black mixed to make the gray patch at the top, and maybe in her shawl.

This painting has a lot of "color" achieved just with black, white, gray, and the background tone.

The pure white is reserved for a few glints on his hair, shoulders, and paint box. A soft gray mixed from white and black on the portfolio at left gives it a bluish appearance.

Most of these originals were used by an engraver to create a woodblock print, so speed and efficiency were paramount. Creating light and dark tones in relation to a middle tone gave a feeling of completeness.

Luděk Marold had a difficult and short life. He was born out of wedlock, fathered by an Army lieutenant who was killed soon after in the Austro-Prussian war. His mother died six years later.

Marold entered the Academy in Prague at 16, but was later expelled. He connected better with the art schools in Munich and Paris, where he befriended Alphonse Mucha and started working as a poster artist and a magazine illustrator.

His big project was a gigantic battle mural, but the stress of working on it, combined with rheumatic fever, brought him to his grave at age 33.

A somber-toned religious procession outdoors in the rain.

As he brings limited color into his paintings, they really come to life. This could have been painted with black, white, and burnt sienna, maybe a touch of blue.