COLOUR

Colour AND form

Much of the practice is characterised by the use of strong intense colour, either single distinct colours or more usually several strong colours together, often with high luminosity, density and hue. 

A key tension within the practice is that although the viewer is lead to colour in a generally unsubtle way, with colour being upfront from the outset, with some work in particular appearing to favour colour over form, composition and other aspects of the work, even at their simplest in terms of composition and form, this work is never about only colour, although it is an important aspect.

Further debate arises from a new interest in monochrome work in black and white, or perhaps without any distinct colour. The work also sometimes features opacity and transparency, which is explored further in other posts on layers and looking and seeing. 

Almost colourless

The optical effects created by the use of colour in the practice is linked to tensions and debates explored in posts on the blurry indistinct nature of the images and on looking and seeing, beauty and aesthetics.

Colour as a key feature, also comes across in the painting practice.

Colour is used as a proposition in making strategy and viewing, often questioning and challenging the research into colour theory and ideas and thoughts around how colour functions and the role of colour.

A number of different views on colour are put forward in Colour After Klein – Rethinking Colour in Modern and Contemporary Art edited by Jane Alison. Louise Bourgeois states: “Colour is stronger than language. It’s a subliminal communication.” Paul Klee comments: “Colour possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it.”

Colour as a medium in it’s own right is discussed: “Most significantly on an aesthetic level, this doubling pointed to the destabilisation of the medium of painting. This condition began to free colour from its immanent connection to a physical support and transformed it into a medium in its own right. Through Klein’s practice, colour became a passage between the materiality of the object and a range of experiences beyond its physical limits” and on Donald Judd: “Paradoxically simple and complex, Judd’s oeuvre is characterised by an acute sensitivity to the physical properties of material, space and critically, light and colour, the latter which may in the end prove to be his finest legacy.”

Colour as a medium in it's own right?

David Bachelor in Chromophobia on the subject of colour charts resonates: “the colour chart, a disposable list of readymade colour. Each strip of paper is a perfect abstract painting in miniature, or a compact example of colour serialism or one page of a vast catalogue raisonne of monochromes.”

He goes on to say: “Above all it is almost impossible to put the experience of colour into words in anything but the most bland and general ways: of the several million different hues that the average human eye is able to discern, most languages have less than a dozen basic terms” and “Unlike form and shape, the visual experience of colour cannot be verified by the other senses. We cannot touch colour, even though it constantly surrounds us and we are in some ways touched by it” and “Colour spreads flows bleeds stains floods soaks seeps merges. It does not segment or subdivide. Colour is fluid.”

He also quotes Roland Barthes “Colour is like a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell.”

Colour

Thoughts on painting and colour are discussed in The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes. Firstly, on Kenneth Noland: “I wanted to have color be the origin of the painting,” Noland said in 1969. “I was trying to neutralize the layout, the shape, the composition in order to get at the color. Pollock had indicated getting away from drawing. I wanted to make color the generating force.”

“Like gigantic watercolours, which they were, Noland’s targets and chevrons bloom and pulsate with light; they offer a pure, uncluttered hedonism to the eye.”

On Rothko: “This format enabled him to eliminate nearly everything from is work except the spatial suggestions and emotive power of his colour, and the breathing intensity of his surfaces,…”

Propositions, making strategies and contexts on viewing surrounding this aspect of colour affecting looking and seeing and aesthetics is explored in further posts.

Colours and interaction

Josef Albers makes some comments pertinent to the practice in Interaction of Colour including: “Colors present themselves on continuous flux, constantly changing neighbors and changing conditions”, “Color acts in a similar way. Because of the after-image (the simultaneous contrast), colors influence and change each other forth and back. They continuously interact – in our perception” and in terms of a tension within the practice around scale: “Here we may point to a discovery made by a few contemporary painters, that the increase in amount of a color – not merely in size of canvas – visually reduces distance. As a consequence, it often produces nearness – meaning intimacy – and respect.”

Henri Matisse in the journal article by Jonathan C. Fish Colour as Sensation in Visual Art in Science comments:“My choice of colours does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on sensitivity, on felt experiences.”

There is of course much contextual theory around colour that I disagree with or that is not pertinent to the practice, one example would be Faber Barren in his journal article Color Perception in Art: Beyond the Eye and Into the Brain “With the advent of Abstract Expressionism around 1950, knowledge and discipline were cast aside. The art of color dropped to its lowest point in art history. Paints were squeezed and poured onto white canvases without much restraint, deliberation or craftsmanship. Acting on impulse and vague “inner necessity”, a struggle for order became a surrender to color chaos” but interested by his assertion regarding scale, that “the more a field of view is covered, the greater will be the effect of illumination.”