On Skin tones...

(The Bather):  I've applied the oil paint over and over again until the layers of colors congeal to something I've been looking for...but I've had to do it many times to blend, shade and tone in order to arrive at the right tonality!  The red made all the difference! No more magenta/violet family, it was wrong for the pinks I was trying to derive, with that cast of orange light that hints a yellowish tonality with the undercurrent of blood flowing through the veins!  I'm seeing why from the Renaissance forward from Rubens to the moderns like F. Bacon and L. Freud, painters have labored so over the colors (plural) of flesh!  It is truly challenging, like trying to breathe life into the form!  Skin has this translucency achieved only through great effort at placement of shadows (blue, reddish or greenish, depending on the light conditions) and the many highlights where light dances on the surface of the skin.  I've made so many adjustments in tone on The Bather that I couldn't possibly remember them all.  But getting the right shade of blue for skin shadows, or when light curves around a soft edge, a rounded form, how it reddens because of refracted light bending around the form.  The color changes there-- where dark encounters the light!  This is difficult to analyze but when you've painted it correctly it becomes a non-issue.  It looks right and so the eye can see the form correctly and see it in context of the light and shadow (it's atmosphere) in the manner that the form occupies space.

Read recently that H. Matisse spent up to 6 months on paintings only to be described as a "spontaneous" painter, like he just sat down and knocked it out in half a day!  It riled him, and who could blame him.  It might look easy, but it's not!