Reframing Constraints with the Zorn Palette

It’s easy to make a list of all the things we cannot easily do, especially now.

Go to a big concert, stand in a crowd. Take a vacation to Portugal.  Visit Gran in her assisted living home. Shake hands with a new colleague, hug an old friend. Go to a fair.  Go to a play. Go to (physical) school or work.

Moving through the world with spontaneity and freedom seems…over.

My nephew is three, and it makes me sad to hear how he’s adapted to the constraints.

“We can’t go to Evie’s house right now,” my sister tells him.

“Because of the pandemic,” he says.

The constraints on the lives we had before are like nothing we’ve ever experienced. I know I’ve felt the whole range of emotions. Feeling trapped. Feeling angry at being told I can’t do the things I used to do. Feeling anxiety about getting sick, about my loved ones getting sick. Feeling grief-stricken and heartbroken, worrying that things will never return to the “normal” I used to love. Feeling numb acceptance, donning my mask and standing six feet away from other parents at the playground.

It’s normal to feel trapped—trapped by constraints, and trapped by the oscillating emotions you may also be feeling from day to day.

But for artists and writers, constraints can often have the opposite effect. Instead of making us feel stifled, they can spark inspiration. If you sit down with a blank computer screen and think, “Okay, now is my time to write,” what happens? Uh…

For me, not much. Deciding on something to write about is a lot of pressure! Or maybe you have plenty to write about, but without structure, you jump around from one thing to the next.

But give me a writing prompt, and I’m full of ideas. Write a story that begins on an airplane and contains a red coat, a mistaken identity, and a ringing bell…

A blank canvas might be equally intimidating. You could paint anything. So what’s it gonna be?

Unlike our art therapy clinicians, I don’t have any formal art training—I just learned about an interesting set of artistic constraints, the Zorn palette, last week.

The Swedish painter Anders Leonard Zorn (1860-1920) is known for his portraits and brushwork, and also for using a paint palette of just four colors. Though there’s been some debate among art historians about the exact colors, most people think they were Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red Medium, Ivory Black, and White. (So, essentially, earthy yellow, rich red, a cool black, and white.)

What can you paint with just four colors? As it turns out, quite a lot.

The constraint of using only four paints forces artists to think less about color and more about value—the full range a color can be on a scale of light to dark.

With just four colors, you can create a palette with enough different shades to paint just about anything (though, admittedly, these colors do lend themselves well to severe-looking Swedish people staying indoors in the winter—greens are more of a challenge in this palette.)

And so we find ourselves in this new, constrained world. Because of the constraints of COVID, everything takes a little more work. Learning new technology for school. Planning a wedding over Zoom. Even buying groceries.

What if we stepped back and thought about these constraints not as a closing, but as an opening? Not as a list of rules, of things taken away, but as a prompt for new creativity?

It’s not an ideal structure, but we have to learn how to make a life within it.

If the fairs and concerts and dinners out with friends were the easy, flashy colors that used to make up our lives, what do we have now? We have the basics. Ochre, red, black, and white. We have to spend a lot less time with color and a lot more time with value.

Value in art (that range of light to dark of any hue) is much more important to the structure of a painting than the colors you choose.

So what are your values?

That word can feel cheesy. But think beyond “family, faith, and football.”

Spending time outdoors is one of my values. Creating something meaningful: a photograph, a poem, an email to a friend, a grounding ritual. Relationships not just with family, but with chosen family. Cooking comforting meals. Celebrating traditions and milestones.

The structure is there, but the ease of execution is not. You have to spend a long time mixing paint if you want to do a landscape with the Zorn palette.

Depending on your location, your own health risks, and your comfort level with being out and about, your values may seem hard to reach right now. If something you value is the rush you get from being in a tightly-packed crowd at an EDM concert, you may need to explore a new hobby. And trying to recreate exact family traditions during a pandemic can be more disappointing than anything else.

Something to remember about working within constraints, though, is that the goal is to take you and your work somewhere new. Zorn’s paintings don’t look like they were created with only four paints—he tested the limits of a whole progression of value. It’s not the airplane, the coat, and the bell that make the story interesting. It’s the characters and how they interact.

This is why “make it virtual” isn’t the answer for everything. Within the new constraints of COVID, we have to find new ways to center our lives around our values, not just continuing to rely on hollow approximations of what we’ve done in the past.

Maybe spending time with family isn’t a big reunion trip, but a daily walk with the people who live in your house.

Maybe pursuing higher education isn’t enrolling in a degree program, but creating a structured course for self-study.

Maybe finding companionship isn’t throwing yourself into the dating pool right now, but rather getting a pet.

Take a look at the paints you have in front of you. Make your own palette of values. You might be surprised at what you can still create.