Theodore Lukits and his Theory of Color

Artist Theodore Lukits (1897-1992) lived in Los Angeles, where he ran a school of painting.

Theodore Lukits (on ladder) and Dean Cornwell (below right)

Lukits had once served as an apprentice to Dean Cornwell (1892-1960). Los Angeles artist David Starrett has made a few short videos to share what he learned from his studies with Lukits in the early 1970s. Youtube Link.

Students were limited to working with white, cadmium yellow pale, cadmium red, a cool red (Ed. note quinacridone red), Phthalo (Monastral) green, and ultramarine blue.

From those colors students would make a color wheel, tinting the colors in the center of the circle with white and darkening them with adjacent colors, but not with black.

Drawing by Theodore Lukits 

As Starrett points out, Lukits placed a lot of importance on understanding drawing and value before embarking on color.

Painting by Theodore Lukits

To start out, students were expected to create 3-month-long graphite drawings of casts, and then they could paint the casts in color, still focusing on value primarily.

Youtube Link. Once they understood value, they painted from still life setups, which were often lit with brightly colored lights.

Painting by Theodore Lukits

Lukits liked painting with strong color oppositions, both of local color and of light colors. Sometimes he would drape a red vase with a green veil, or put two strongly colored objects next to each other.

Lukits discouraged the use of earth colors, which he called "tobacco juice" colors. He argued that you didn't need them because you could mix any color from the few basic hues. (Youtube Link)

Painting by T. Lukits

Lukits himself studied in Chicago under Carl Werntz (1874–1944), William Victor Higgins, Karl Albert Buehr (1866–1952), Wellington J. Reynolds (1866–1949), Harry Mills Walcott 1877–1930), Edwin Blashfield (1848–1936), Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872–1930), and George Bellows(1882–1925). He also traveled and studied with Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) when Mucha was developing the Slav Epics.

Lukits students include not only David Starrett, but also Peter S. Adams, Tim Solliday, and Frank Ordaz.
-------
Previous posts featuring David Starrett

Dave's dog Randy

My friend David Starrett is the son of Charlie Starrett, the great cowboy actor. A few years ago I sketched David and one of his dad's old holsters. 

And that's David's loyal dog Randy, a sweet bear of a dog. Jeanette and I got to take Randy on a walk around the block. Randy passed on last week, so so we send our sympathies to David on the loss of his best friend.

Portrait Noir

“I’ve never seen an October rain like this in all my years in LA,” says my friend David Starrett as we arrive for lunch yesterday at Gus’s Barbecue in South Pasadena. At the back door we drop our umbrella in a bucket full of other half-dead umbrellas.

David was one of my art teachers when I was a student out here. Later he was the model for Lee Crabb in Dinotopia. He’s the nicest 82-year-old gentleman you’ll ever meet. His ear is the model for “subsurface scattering” on page 155 of the book “Color and Light.” He’s also a natural actor, and he obliges me by being a character actor while I sketch him.



He orders barbecued ribs and I order coffee. I unholster my colored pencils. Robert Johnson’s blues pour out of the speakers. Rain gushes out of the gutters outside. David turns up his collar. I squeeze the handle of my black Niji brush pen. A drop of Higgins Eternal bleeds out of the tip.



Somehow he starts to look like a hard-boiled film noir detective, the kind of guy who works best after hours on rainy nights when the rest of the guys have gone home. “That’s when they dump the evidence,” he mutters, as he saws loose a rib.

The Real Lee Crabb

The guy who modeled for Lee Crabb, the sneaky malcontent in Dinotopia, is an old friend named David Starrett. He is pretty craggy, but he’s a lot more handsome than the character I turned him into. He is the son of the famous western character actor Charles Starrett.

Dave Starrett has taught art for many years at various art schools in Los Angeles. Jeanette and I knew him mainly as a sketching and an art museum buddy.

He would pick us up in his old VW camper van, which he called the Foxmobile. We’d go over to the Huntington Library to look at paintings. He pulled all these mirrors and flashlights and viewscopes out of his pocket until the guards put us on a close watch.

While standing in front of a painting, he would make up stories about the artist: “Gainsborough lost an arm in a sword fight and had to switch to painting with his other arm…Renoir did this entire painting while standing in six inches of coconut milk in a bathtub.” Museum goers would tag along to hear the juicy tidbits.

That was before the days of those gawdawful preprogrammed audio guides, which turn museum-goers into mindless zombies.

Then we’d go out painting in the gardens out back. Sometimes a flock of foreign tourists would come by and ask him, “Are you an artist?”

“No, I’m a plumber,” he’d snap back. “Just finished putting in a commode.”

How Rockwell turned a detractor into a defender

My friend David Starrett met Norman Rockwell a couple of times in Los Angeles in 1949 when Rockwell was artist-in-residence at the old Otis art school. David told me this story, which he witnessed.

In those days, a lot of the art teachers at Otis criticized Rockwell. One remarked, as he passed through the hallway, "The only way Rockwell can paint is from a photo." Rockwell happened to be working in a classroom and overheard the comment.

Later that day, Rockwell, a slender and modest man, approached the critic as a dachshund might approach a pit bull.

"You have an interesting face," he said. "May I paint your portrait? Why don't you come by tomorrow around noon?"

The critic agreed, and the next day Rockwell proceeded to paint a perfect likeness from observation, all the while regaling the man with amusing stories. Then he gave him the painting.

The painting went up in the man's office and it blew everyone away. Now Rockwell's toughest critic became his biggest champion. No one could say a single word against Rockwell without an argument from this guy.

Beloved Friends

Here are two gouache portraits I painted while waiting for supper.


Our beloved art-teacher friends David Starrett and Sam Clayberger mentored us 35 years ago when Jeanette and I were were just sketching companions.

When we're with old pals like these, the years disappear, and we live in a moment that I wish could last forever.

Sketching Hats

Plein-air painters must choose the right brushes and paint, but they must also choose the right hat.

From left: Peder Krøyer, Carl von Marr, Theodore Robinson, Unidentified, Aldro Hibbard, and Ivan Shishkin.

Here are a few contemporary hat choices: Armand Cabrera, me, David Starrett, Jeanette G., Tom Kegler, and Jacob Collins.

Clothespins and Crabb

One evidence of the true artist is the transformation of ordinary things into little fragments of beauty.

David Starrett paints each of his wooden clothespins with a different design, each a variation of his mascot, the fox.

A left-handed painter, he thinks big. He came up with this prototype for a large oil palette, though he works more often in watercolor.

He taught for many years in the Los Angeles area at Otis, Valley College, and Art Center.

When he visited in 1990, he posed for Lee Crabb, the malcontent and schemer in Dinotopia: a Land Apart from Time. But in truth he has a heart of gold.

Previously: The Real Lee Crabb