Donald Jusko

Waikani Bridge - Maui - Acrylic Painting

Donald A Jusko en plein air - painting on location.

Don Jusko is known around Maui in Hawaii as the Travelling Artist. He has been painting Maui on location from a VW van for twenty years now. Back in 1964 he was an art director for an advertising agency in Florida - USA. Don has is very particular about colour and pigments, having recently revolutionised the colour wheel which he uses and prescribes for natural realism in natural light.

What can we do to paint anything we see accurately? We can learn from nature, and express the world as it is expressed to us. We can use the sound principles of drawing and painting, as in dividing distances into concentric rings around ourselves, outlining objects on those rings and using colours bound by those rings. I paint the colours of one hour of one day, no matter how many days it takes.

The painting above is an earlier rendition. His more recent works reflect his latest colour theories and the results are clearly evident in the following painting examples. The colours are pure and come alive as though dancing in the sun.

You can't learn to paint from a book, but you don't have to start from scratch either. Correct colour and procedure can make learning easier and faster. This is something that Don steadfastedly holds to and the reflection can be seen in his more recent paintings - they come alive as if dancing in the sun.

I think the most important single issue relates to colour and how we perceive it.
The use of the three primary "Neutral Dark's", made from opposite colour
combinations with compatible pigments, is the key information toward achieving
accurate dark colours and split analogous combinations in a painting.

There is no black reflected in nature. It can be reproduced with colour pigments.

There should be no pigment black on the artist's palette, as it dulls and absorbs the colour and is unnatural looking. Delacroix said grey was the enemy of all artists, I think he meant any colour shaded with black, not just grey. The artist painting from life needs opposite complementary colours to make the dark shade, not "Black" as Oswalt and others have suggested.

Today's chaotic art represents our times, the primitive nature of it is the result of two world wars and this is not the first time our craft has gone downhill, it'0 has happened after each war period throughout time. We have suffered a world of art lost to abstraction - and now are faced with the extinction of art as it has always been none - to concede to and witness the attention given to computer artists. Most of which have never felt a brush or worked with real colour and paints.

Click here to contact Donald or to research his colour
theories and revolutionary Colour Wheel.