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Stratoz forwarded this TED talk by Neil Harbission, an artist who is completely colorblind. He created a way to translate colors into sounds, and the colors became such a part of him that he started dreaming in color.
You can’t go wrong with stop motion video, OK Go and color mixing.
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.
Hilma af Klint(1862-1944), was of the first generation of Swedish women allowed into Sweden’s art schools. She discovered spiritualism and attributed her paintings to a higher consciousness working through her, and she and four of her friends were influenced by Theosophy and Rudolf Steiner. I discovered this in the middle of reading Rudolf Steiner’s book on color theory.
Some of her spiritual paintings were first shown the exhibition, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 at LACMA Los Angeles 1986, along with famous painters such as Kandinsky and Mondrian, but Hilma af Klint was out of the loop of the art world, with her paintings. In a way she reminds me of Albert Barnes and his Barnes Foundation, in her guarding of her work, which cannot be sold, only released to institutions in order to support her archive. Because she has no collectors and is not part of the marketplace, it’s like her work became immaterial.
Hilma af Klint: A Paintings for the Future Painters’ Table
Includes 20 minute video on af Klint’s work.
Kopenhagen Magasin with many images of af Klint’s work.
Stratoz was pleased to find a J for me, Alfred Jensen(1903-1981), since his jazz doodle was set to Christine and Ingrid Jensen. Alfred Jensen incorporated diagrams, numerical systems, textiles from Guatemala, and the color theory of Goethe into his paintings. His work contains both the mandala like circular forms and quilt patterning that I am drawn to in my own work.
Ellen Heck is a fine art printmaker living in the San Francisco Bay Area, and these color wheels are a visual journal of the colors of her landscape. These appeal to my librarian and artist senses, with the organizing of ideas in a visual classification. There are times when the artifacts of creating art are as appealing as the finished piece, and imbue it with their own qualities.
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
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.
