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You can’t go wrong with stop motion video, OK Go and color mixing.
Tag: color theory
N is for Neon Spreading Illusion: A to Z Challenge 2014
The first time we witnessed the Blue Neon Madonna(not her real name), Stratoz and I were startled. She has a blue mantle of other-worldliness. Another favorite neon was Electronic Superhighway by Nam June Paik.
Neon signs combine glass tubes with inert gases and electrification to create a gorgeous glow. I love neon signs, but neon paint never appealed to me, and in investigating what makes a color “neon,” I discovered that it’s the addition of substances that show up under UV or black light. The paint will reflect back more light than expected. I also discovered the illusion of neon color spreading, where colored lines in the midst of black lines take on a glow like a neon sign.
M is for Mauve: A to Z Challenge 2014
When I saw Simon Garfield’s book on the color mauve, I checked it out of the library immediately. I wasn’t a mauve enthusiast, but the idea of a whole book about one color was intriguing. William Perkin(1838-1907) was experimenting with coal tar, in hopes of finding a cure for malaria, but instead noticed an intense purple color in his beaker. Perkin pursued the manufacture of mauve, a world awash in shifting purple pinks.
Because it is also Orange Tuesday, I will mention another coal tar dye called Methyl Orange. It changes color, from red in acid, to yellow in base.
L is for Light Receptors: A to Z Challenge 2014
Mixing primary color paint is an ingrained memory from elementary school. Mixing light is much less familiar, and watching this video was a bit unnerving. If you mix red and green light, our brains will interpret it as yellow light. I was staggered by the complexity of interpretation on the part of the brain, creating many colors with of just three types of light receptors: red, green, and blue.
I is for Johannes Itten: A to Z Challenge 2014
I found a copy of Johannes Itten’s book The Art of Color at a rummage sale. Itten was a Swiss Expressionist painter influential on artists of the Bauhaus.
Itten taught about color in the face of the belief that either you were good with color or you were not.
Most instructive was Itten’s statement that, “A color is always to be seen in relation to its surroundings.” Colors shift according to their neighbors and to the light. Itten describes a mausoleum in Ravenna with blue mosaic walls, and narrow windows of orange tinted alabaster. Orange and blue are complements which means they mix into gray, and Itten says the light in the mausoleum is a magical gray, with the walls reflecting blue and orange depending on the angles.
I appreciate his assertion that mosaic art places “high demands on coloristic powers” with each fragment acting in relation to many others.
G is for Gray Tones: A to Z Challenge 2014
When I met Stratoz, he said his favorite color was gray. He still digs it. He’s also doing an A to Z challenge, doodling his way through the alphabet with jazz on the stereo. Since it’s Orange Tuesday, I also include this photo of a gray pendant I created with a dash of orange.
F is for George Field the Color-Man: A to Z Challenge 2014
One of my favorite classes in Library School was Preservation of Materials, and I wrote a proposal for a program to encourage artists to use archival art supplies. I wasn’t making art at that time, but the subject seized my imagination.
George Field(1777-1854), was a British color-maker who manufactured pigments, and who wanted the colors to stay fast. He kept copious notes on his experiments with the chemistry of dyes and pigments, which were acquired by Winsor & Newton after his death. when I finally took a watercolor class to explore my pull toward art, I bought tubes of Winsor & Newton.
One the articles that introduced me to Field appealed to my former librarian self by including a proper format for citation:
HOW TO CITE THIS BRANCH ENTRY (MLA format)
Shires, Linda M. “On Color Theory, 1835: George Field’s Chromatography.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. [Accessed April, 7,2014].
On a Color Theory, 1835: George Field’s Chromatography
E is for Earthtones: A to Z Challenge 2014
Earthtones rise out of browns and grays and can be muted or intense. When I was 10, I came across a Sears catalog from 1972, and the shades of rust, brown, and orange created a world different than my own. This was the first time I realized an era had a look of its own. Pigments made with earth elements have been around a long time: ochre, sienna, burnt umber, but dictionaries attribute the actual term “earthtones” to the 1970’s.
International Colour Day: Celebrating the Equinox in a New Way
Thanks to Instagram I discovered International Colour Day, which was created in by the AIC ~ International Colour Association. I am still charmed by color spelled with a “u” since I grew up in Canada, and it took me awhile to unlearn the spelling when I moved to the United States.
The AIC chose the Spring Equinox to celebrate color because of the equal balance of light and dark, day and night. Color draws me into the studio, and is the fuel for my art. I watch how people respond to my work, how color can draw them like a magnet. The blue-green people are particularly sensitive to those tones, lit up from within, as are the lovers of the spectrum of visible light.
For my celebration, check out my Color Wheel Pinterest Board.
Butterfly in Flight: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism
I grew up in Canada, and prefer going north in the summer, but Stratoz and I made a rare venture south for vacation. We discovered the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, which reveals more delight around each partial wall, a maze to enjoy rather than get lost in. The painting Flight of the Butterfly No. 1 by Stanton Macdonald-Wright caught my eye right away with the blocks of color and the spiral shape. To see the whole painting, plus more of the collection, check out Amy Looks Closer: North Carolina Museum of Art.
Macdonald-Wright named his painting style Synchromism “with color” as Symphony is “with sound,” and envisioned color as akin to music, not needing to be tethered to a literal interpretation of the world. He imagined a scale of colors, which could be orchestrated like musical notes. Often there was a central vortex out of which the other colors arose. The orange in the center of Flight of the Butterfly is bursting with sound against the blue-violet. I make mosaic spirals and something about Macdonald-Wright’s unwinding center resonates.
Macdonald-Wright was given his first name, Stanton, in honor of women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and he hyphenated his middle and last names to avoid the constant question of whether he was related to Frank Lloyd Wright. His older brother, Willard Huntington Wright, wrote the Philo Vance detective novels under the pen name S. S. Van Dine.