![atoz [2014] - BANNER - 910](https://www.margaretalmon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/atoz-2014-BANNER-910-500x41.jpg){kind=small}
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.
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
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.
Color wheels fascinated me from the first time I saw one. The colors transition one to the next, round and round, and you can see the relationship between colors and their opposite across the wheel. This particular one enchanted me because it has a spinning part for visualizing even more color combinations.
Check out my Color Wheel Love Pinterest Board for more goodness.
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.
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.
My love of orange appeared when I started making art in my 30’s. My sister loved orange as a child, but I was unmoved, baffled. I discovered that orange was a contentious subject for some color theorists at the beginning of the 20th Century. Albert Munsell worked on developing a color notation system, like a Dewey Decimal for color, without names, which he found undecipherable, and his notation is still used in the 21st Century.
Orange is known as Yellow-Red. Munsell was an artist, and he envisioned colors as mixtures of pigments, and orange was yellow plus red pigment. He wanted to teach children about color starting with the primary hues and only then moving to intermediate ones like orange. Henry Bailey, a teacher of art, was incensed at the notion that children weren’t ready to learn about orange. He saw orange as a basic color, along with green and violet, in addition to the primaries of red, yellow and blue. Both Munsell and Bailey took color education very seriously, in an odd forward echo of sex education in my own era.
Reading the text of Bailey’s lecture on color, I was surprised by the sudden turn into theology.
In conclusion Mr Bailey said that the end of all education is character God’s aim in this world is the perfection of human souls and he has flooded it with color. Let us try to lead the children to see the color that there is in the world and to love it. And when we are weary of this world we love to read of the next and in the Book of Revelations we are told that the gates of the heavenly city have the colors of the most beautiful and most precious stones and may it not prove that in teaching our pupils to appreciate the beauties of this earthly habitation we are preparing them to share the glories of that eternal abode that house not made with hands
I have a spiritual connection with color, though not in a Book of Revelations way. In spite of my discomfort with color theory being equated with preparation for the gates of heaven, there is something wonderful about Bailey’s line, “Let us try to lead the children to see the color that there is in the world and to love it.”
More Yellow-Red Goodness on my Orange Tuesdays Pinterest Board
Ann Brauer makes quilts from color, from landscape, from beauty. I love how she lets the colors play off of each other, whether in intense jewel tones, rainbow progressions, or in letting flashes of brightness be wrapped in greys and browns. On twitter she made a comment that resonated with me about people not realizing they were looking for a quilt until they saw hers. We get ideas about what “quilts” are or what “mosaics” are. There is immense wonder in being wowed by an artwork, in responding before we even know what we are looking at.
The piece above, Ancient Light, is captivating with the windows of orange against the muted background. She wrote a blog post, Why Grey?
Why did I want to work in these colors again? What was it about them? Why was I drawn to these soft colors of slate and mist, mauve and taupe? Was it the trees in the winter? Their bark against the fallen leaves? Or the sky just before a snow storm? Those deep rich colors? Or just wanting to contrast these dark colors against clouds of light and promise?
More Orange Goodness on my Orange Tuesdays Pinterest Board
Alas, Nita Leland’s Exploring Color: How to Use and Control Color in Your Painting is out of print, but used copies are still around. I found a copy at the public library in 2004, and was entranced with Nita Leland’s assertion that color can be learned. As I explored collage and other visual mediums, I noticed how strongly I responded to color, and I wanted to understand this language of hue and tone and contrast. I took a watercolor class, and all I wanted to do was mix colors, which didn’t translate into actually painting much.
It was exciting having a name for why two colors practically vibrate next to each other(ie. orange and blue, complementary colors), and learning how colors transition into each other around a color wheel. I found my notebook of color experiments, and it brought back the thrill of trying these combinations out for myself. I played with a “tetrad” of red-orange/yellow-green/blue-violet/blue-green.I wrote a page of anxious notes about whether the colors were what I thought they were, but that’s part of what happens with colors. They shift and shimmer depending on context. Fortunately, I wrote at the end the page that I really liked the red of the ship against the blue, and the yellow-green against the red-orange. Color sense cannot be completely articulated in words, and along with learning the language color, I’ve also learned about the unspoken nature of color.
