Beautiful Shades of Brown: Laura Wheeler Waring, Artist: 03/04/24

Beautiful Shades of Brown: Laura Wheeler Waring, Artist by Nancy Churnin and Felicia Marshall (Illustrator) (2020) is a picture book biography of Laura Wheeler Waring a Black woman who made career as a portrait painter. The heavy lifting of telling this woman's story is done by Felicia Marshall's fantastic painted illustrations.

The book covers her early years painting, through her schooling, life in Europe and eventual success here in the United States. The author's note includes a brief summary of her life that isn't covered in the text, which is more centered on who the artist painted, rather than on what other things she did in her life. Likewise there is a timeline.

The good of the book is I learned about a new-to-me artist. I have someone new to research and whose artworks I want to dive into.

However, I still feel like I don't truly know the artist and I'm annoyed that the book was written by a well meaning white woman who did the basic research, probably based on the paintings owned by the Smithsonian, and didn't stop to consider how a Black woman artist would describe the colors she was using or her methodology for picking them.

Being a woman and Black were two big obstacles for a person driven to create art. There is no mention of how she got her supplies, or what her favorite pigments were, or her drive beyond, "One day, she dreamed, her paintings would hang in museums, and everyone would see how much color brown could hold."

If only the author had stuck to using "brown" as a word it would have been okay. Maybe a little samey, but, no she fell into the usual white person trap (and I say this as a white person) of describing the various browns in food terms. Mentions of potatoes, coffee, chocolate, caramel, and so forth. The author has the young artist lamenting "there should be fifty words for brown."

Illustrator Felicia Marshall is very precise in her pieces for his book. She manages to get Laura Wheeler Waring and the other people in the book in historically accurate clothing. We know what she looked like, what she wore, and if the illustrations are to be believed, what equipment she used to paint on, even as a child. That H frame easel from her childhood is a pricey piece of equipment, implying that Laura's family were a family of means.

My point is, Laura probably had access to good pigments even as a child. She probably started off with a limited palette because as children we're taught the basic colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple, brown, black, and white. But as she painted, as she ran out of paint, as her parents realized she was on a life path, she would have gotten access to paints with fancier names and a much wider range of browns that aren't named after foods.

Mind you the hues sold change over time, but a brief survey of browns available in student sets now are:

• Indian red
• Van Dyke brown
• burnt umber
• azo brown
• raw sienna
• raw umber
• burnt sienna
• rosy beige
• asphaultum
• black spinel
• transparent earth red
• transparent earth yellow
• transparent red oxide
• Italian brown pink lake
• Old Holland light red
• Old Holland ochre
• yellow ochre half burnt
• warm sepia extra
• Italian earth
• Old Holland yellow brown

My point is, the book would have been so much stronger if more work had been done in learning about the pigments she used. A better sentiment than there should be x number of words for brown would have been to teach the world about all the different words for brown. Or something like that.

Four stars

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