Colour as pigment
Pigments are insoluble in water, they can be ground to form fine particles from natural substances like earth which can provide a red or yellow ochre, charcoal or calcite which provides white. Dyes are soluble in water and used for inks and dyes for fabrics. Contemporary pigments are usually synthetic.
Dyes can be extracted from plants or synthetic and are processed to provide a variety of colours.
https://www.ocres-de-france.com/en/content/56-pigments-information
Information about the development and use of pigment in painting (in timeline format) including examples from pre history to contemporary works. http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/history.html
Man discovers pigment
Cave painting. Lascaux South West France
A virtual tour of Lascaux: https://vimeo.com/40849516
More images of cave paintings: http://noisebreak.com/art-ancestors-10-amazing-cave-paintings-world/
Sculpture and pigment
We see most Greek sculpture or friezes as below and have appreciated this as something that has an aesthetic quality.
Cavalcade. West frieze. Parthenon British Museum.
In fact many Greek sculptures and friezes were painted. The frieze probably looked as depicted in this painting below by Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
Phidias showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his friends (1868) Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) Birmingham museums trust.
So how did this appreciation of the ‘whiteness’ of these icons develop.
“As the artist and critic David Batchelor writes in his 2000 book, “Chromophobia,” at a certain point ignorance becomes willful denial—a kind of “negative hallucination” in which we refuse to see what is before our eyes. Mark Abbe, who has become the leading American scholar of ancient Greek and Roman polychromy, believes that, when such a delusion persists, you have to ask yourself, “Cui bono?”—“Who benefits?” He told me, “If we weren’t benefitting, we wouldn’t be so invested in it. We benefit from a whole range of assumptions about cultural, ethnic, and racial superiority. We benefit in terms of the core identity of Western civilization, that sense of the West as more rational—the Greek miracle and all that. And I’m not saying there’s no truth to the idea that something singular happened in Greece and Rome, but we can do better and see the ancient past on a broader cultural horizon.”
The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture. Margaret Talbot (October 22nd 2018. The New Yorker) Full article below. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture
Left: The Phrasikleia Kore, an Archaic Greek funerary statue created in the sixth century B.C. Courtesy Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung. Right: A color reconstruction of the Phrasikleia Kore, completed in 2010. Courtesy Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung
“ I didn’t want them to be anything, to have the graspability of a figure or a statue. They had to be something that you really took time to understand visually and emotionally.” —Anthony Caro. https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2015/anthony-caro-works-from-the-1960s/
Early one morning (1962) Sir Anthony Caro (1924-2013) Tate Gallery London
The month of May (1963) Sir Anthony Caro (1924-2013) Courtesy Barford Sculptures adn Gagosian Gallery, photo: Mike Bruce)
“Great art, like the surface of a Teflon pan, prevents things from sticking to it, particularly criticism.
That’s true of Anthony Caro’s ebullient sculptures at Gagosian Gallery, which look as fresh as the day they were made. In the 1960s, all kinds of nutty stuff was said about the abstract sculptures Caro (1924-2013) composed. For a handful of critics, his welded steel structures embodied the best Western Civilization could deliver: true meaning and authentic experience in the face of a culture increasingly overrun by prepackaged sentiments and alienating distractions. That led to a backlash that lasted well into the 21st century. For nearly 40 years, Caro’s brightly colored arrangements of I-beams, bars and chunks of metal were seen as vacuous baubles that steered clear of social issues to preserve the illusion that art exists apart from everyday life. Today,neither view comes close to the pleasures—both physical and intellectual—that Caro’s sculptures serve up in abundance. At a time when so much of what we see comes to us via small screens, it’s thrilling to come across a sculpture by Caro. Three galleries filled with works made from 1960 to 1976 is an event not to be missed. To begin, all you need to know about Caro’s sculptures is that they take fun seriously—and share it generously. The fun he had in the studio—putting parts together as if just kissing one another—is palpable. You feel an adventuresome intelligence at work, saying to itself, “How far can I spread a form out in space and still have it hold together as a single entity?” To walk around Caro’s pieces is to see their compositions shift radically.His capacity to transform construction-site leftovers into stimulating compositions sharpens the senses, boggles the mind and attunes us to our surroundings, not to mention our memories of other situations. For me, Henri Matisse and ice hockey come to mind. The efficiency of Matisse’s cutouts—particularly the way they play positive and negative space off each other—lies behind Caro’s forms, which make space expand and contract. The same goes for the speed, power and precision of hockey, especially when each teammate’s swooping movements coalesce into an unplanned ballet. That’s how your eyes move through Caro’s sculptures. Too quick for words, his abstract arrangements elicit unanticipated twists and turns best experienced in the flesh.”not to mention our memories of other situations. For me, Henri Matisse and ice hockey come to mind. The efficiency of Matisse’s cutouts—particularly the way they play positive and negative space off each other—lies behind Caro’s forms, which make space expand and contract. The same goes for the speed, power and precision of hockey, especially when each teammate’s swooping movements coalesce into an unplanned ballet. That’s how your eyes move through Caro’s sculptures. Too quick for words, his abstract arrangements elicit unanticipated twists and turns best experienced in the flesh.”not to mention our memories of other situations. For me, Henri Matisse and ice hockey come to mind. The efficiency of Matisse’s cutouts—particularly the way they play positive and negative space off each other—lies behind Caro’s forms, which make space expand and contract. The same goes for the speed, power and precision of hockey, especially when each teammate’s swooping movements coalesce into an unplanned ballet. That’s how your eyes move through Caro’s sculptures. Too quick for words, his abstract arrangements elicit unanticipated twists and turns best experienced in the flesh.”power and precision of hockey, especially when each teammate’s swooping movements coalesce into an unplanned ballet. That’s how your eyes move through Caro’s sculptures. Too quick for words, his abstract arrangements elicit unanticipated twists and turns best experienced in the flesh.”power and precision of hockey, especially when each teammate’s swooping movements coalesce into an unplanned ballet. That’s how your eyes move through Caro’s sculptures. Too quick for words, his abstract arrangements elicit unanticipated twists and turns best experienced in the flesh.”
David Pagel
Carmen Herrera
“FEW ART EXHIBITS ARE FIVE DECADES IN THE MAKING, but the pieces seen in Carmen Herrera: Estructuras Monumentales, an outdoor exhibition of oversized aluminum structures currently on display at Buffalo Bayou Park through April 23, 2021, are just that.
While the designs, first conceived by Cuban American artist Carmen Herrera in the 1960s, initially took shape on paper, their 105-year-old creator always envisioned them coming to life in three dimensions. But moving from drawings to physical structures was always too costly for Herrera to manage on her own.” https://repeatingislands.com/2020/10/30/check-out-carmen-herrera-estructuras-monumentales-an-exhibition-50-years-in-the-making/
Gemini, 1971/2019 Carmen Herrera (1915-) Estructuras Monumentales at Buffalo Bayou Park.
“Core to Carmen Herrera’s painting is a drive for formal simplicity and a striking sense of colour: “My quest”, she says, “is for the simplest of pictorial resolutions” (2012). A master of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera creates symmetry, asymmetry and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension across the canvas with the most unobtrusive application of paint. As she moved towards pure, geometric abstraction in the post-war years in Paris, she exhibited alongside Theo van Doesburg, Max Bill and Piet Mondrian and a younger generation of Latin American artists, such as members of the Venezuelan Los Disidentes, Brazilian Concretists and the Argentinian Grupo Madi. Her work also chimes with her peers from the U.S. school such as Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith. Reflecting on this period, she says, “I began a lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn’t essential” (2005). While allied with Latin American non-representational concrete painting, Herrera’s body of work has established, quietly but steadily, a cross-cultural dialogue within the international history of modernist abstraction.” https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/carmen-herrera
Black and orange (1989- Carmen Herrera (1915-) Lisson Gallery
Herrera is equanimous about the neglect. “Being ignored is a form of freedom,” she writes. “I truly used that all my life. I felt liberated from having to constantly please anyone.”
Read more here: https://www.ft.com/content/8f08a20a-ac28-4a56-92f2-362a426d35ad and here: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/29/carmen-herrera-art-without-lies/
Spirituality
“In their deep conviction in art’s power to express emotions, the Expressionists and particularly the Blue Rider group with Kandinsky at its head, explored the effects of color on man. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), Kandinsky affirmed that the real mission of art is of spiritual nature and thus built a sort of reading grid for colors. He associated emotions and sounds to 10 colors amongst which he considers blue and yellow to be opposites, like black and white. In this way, “deep blue attracts man towards infinity, awakening in him a desire for purity and a quench for the supernatural”. In his search of abstraction, Kandinsky created paintings that do look like melodies, and inspire body, mind and soul.”
https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/understanding-color-theory/
Yellow, Red, Blue (1925) Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)
More about Wassily Kandinsky here: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/kandinsky-wassily/
Colour field painting
“Color Field Painting is a tendency within Abstract Expressionism, distinct from gestural abstraction, or Action Painting. It was pioneered in the late 1940s by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, who were all independently searching for a style of abstraction that might provide a modern, mythic art and express a yearning for transcendence and the infinite. To achieve this they abandoned all suggestions of figuration and instead exploited the expressive power of color by deploying it in large fields that might envelope the viewer when seen at close quarters. Their work inspired much Post-painterly abstraction, particularly that of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, though for later color field painters, matters of form tended to be more important than mythic content.” https://www.theartstory.org/movement/color-field-painting/
Cathedra (1951) Barnett Newman (1905-1970) Municipal museum Amsterdam.
Robyn Denny
“Confronted by the monumental hard-edge paintings from the mid-1960s of Robyn Denny, who has died aged 83, the viewer may be reminded of the famous figures of the New York School – Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko, perhaps. Often in muted blues, greys and browns, and with sharply abutted planes of colour crystallising into a geometrical figure that locks the gaze, these works, however, are the product of a reaction to the British tradition of landscape painting.”
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/29/robyn-denny
No title. Screenprint on paper (1970) Robyn Denny (1930–2014) Tate Gallery
More about Robyn Denny: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/robyn-denny-997
Carnival of colour
Henri Matisse
“I finally came to consider colors as forces, to be assembled as inspiration dictates. Colors can be transformed by relation; a black becomes red-black when you put it next to a rather cold color like Prussian blue, blue-black if you put it alongside a color that has an extremely hot basis: orange, for example. From that point on, I began working with a palette especially composed for each painting while I was working on it, which meant I could eliminate one of the primordial colors, like a red or a yellow or a blue, from my painting. And it goes right against neoimpressionist theory, which is based on optical mixing and color constraints, each color having its reaction. For example: if there is red, there has to be a green…. In a picture, neoimpressionist color reactions involved dominants. These dominants create reactions, but they have to remain dominants…. In terms of intensity, my reactions aren’t subordinate to the dominants, they’re on the same level… All the colors sing together; their strength is determined by the needs of the chorus. It’s like a musical chord.”
https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/as-inspiration-dictates-henri-matisse-on-color/
Les Codomas (1943) Gouache on paper. Henri Matisse (1869-1954).
More about Henri Matisse here: https://www.vulture.com/2014/10/moma-henri-matisse-review-dont-miss.html
Ciro Quintana
“Ciro Quintana (Havana, 1964) is one of the cardinal artists within the second wave of the so-called Cuban Renaissance or New Cuban Art. His work, along with that of Ana Albertina Delgado, Adriano Buergo, Ermi Taño and Lázaro Saavedra, shook the artistic and social panorama of Cuba in 1986 when the iconoclastic group Puré -characterized as by kitsch, junk art, confusion between boundaries of artistic individualities and, above all, the treatment of themes directly associated with the daily and popular life of Havana at the time- broke in into Havana cultural scene. Although short-lived (the group finally disintegrated in 1987 to give way to the development of the personal poetics of its members), the impact of Puré and its bold collective actions implied a milestone in contemporary Cuban art and, consequently, in the further development of each one of the members of the group.”
Janet Batet
The rapture of my garden (date unknown) Ciro Quintana (1964-)
More about Ciro Quintana here:
https://ciroquintanaciroartcontemporarycubanartist.wordpress.com
Romare Bearden
“A pioneer of African-American art and celebrated collagist, Romare Bearden seamlessly blended images of African-American life in the urban and rural South with references to popular culture, religion, and Classical art and myth. He depicted jazz musicians, monumental subjects, nudes, or mythological characters set against abstract, fragmented backgrounds. Each of his collages integrated images painted in gouache, watercolors, oil paints, which he would then fix to paper or canvas. Bearden sought to give the African-American experience a universal, monumental, and Classical representation: he would often recast Classical events with African-American subjects, as in The Return of Odysseus (Homage to Pintoricchio and Benin) (1977). By rendering Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus as African-Americans, Bearden drew the political injustices of his time into a universal, allegorical context.” https://www.artsy.net/artist/romare-bearden
Collage: Profile/Part II, The Thirties, Come on (1981) Romare Beardon ( 1911 -1988)
More about Romare Beardon below
Collage: Jazz II (1980) Romare Beardon ( 1911 -1988)
Colour as light
”Around 1671-72, Sir Isaac Newton discovered the origin of color when he shone a beam of light through an angular prism and split it into the spectrum - the various colors of the rainbow. This simple experiment demonstrated that color comes from light - in fact, that color is light. Scientists investigate the objective properties of color while artists explore its subjective visual effects.
Claude Monet, the greatest exponent of Impressionism, created several series of oil paintings analyzing the effects of light. Our example is from a series of around twenty paintings of Rouen Cathedral from 1892-1894 which show the building at different times of day, at different times of year and under different weather conditions. Monet explored the effects of light through a series of still images but he was trying to communicate an experience of color that was only observable across a period of time.”
More here: https://www.artyfactory.com/color_theory/color_theory_1.htm
Watch a ‘time lapse’ of the effects that the change in light made to the appearance of the entrance to Rouen Cathedral.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9ykMJPu7FY
James Turrell
For over half a century, the American artist James Turrell has worked directly with light and space to create artworks that engage viewers with the limits and wonder of human perception.
“My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing. I’m also interested in the sense of presence of space; that is space where you feel a presence, almost an entity — that physical feeling and power that space can give.”
Key Lime (1994) James Turrell, (1943) fluorescent and LED light into space with fiber optic cable. Los Angeles Museum of Art (artwork © James Turrell, photo by Florian Holzherr)
“We seldom think of the artistic process in the same way we might think of traditional scholarly research. Those wholly unacquainted with the process might envision artistic frenzy overtaking the individual, who is then spurred into creative action. And even those who know or are themselves artists may find the process ineffable. But much like the traditional academic—who begins with a question, evolves a hypothesis, conducts research, and, finally, makes a discovery—there is in James Turrell’s body of work the sense of that same process: the bud of a youthful idea blossoming over decades, each phase of his career guided by a common question.”
Breathing Light (2013) James Turrell ( 1943) LED light into space. Los Angeles Museum of Art (artwork © James Turrell, photo by Florian Holzherr).
More about James Turrell here:
https://www.cgu.edu/news/2013/12/artist-james-turrell-creates-intense-sensory-experiences/
Keith Sonnier
“Keith Sonnier is a post-Minimalist American artist. Starting out in New York in the mid-1960s, he completely reinvented sculpture, revamping traditionally used materials andtechniques to experiment with new forms. Despite sharing a desire for anti-illusionistsculpture with Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt, from the outset, Sonnier’s workswere imbued with a more narrative, literary quality than those of the Minimalist artists.In 1968, Sonnier became one of the first artists to explore the effects of light in his work by making and incorporating curved fluorescent lights to initiate a dialogue between the works and their surroundings.”
http://galeriemitterrand.com/en/artistes/presentation/3423/keith-sonnier
Dis-Play II (1970) Keith Sonnier (1941-2020) Foam rubber, fluorescent powder, strobe light, black light, neon, glass
Passage Azure (2015/2018) Keith Sonnier (1941-2020)
“These fluorescent light and glass pieces remind me a lot of driving in Louisiana,” said Sonnier in a 1977 interview highlighted in the exhibition. “Coming back late at night, and in the distance seeing a club somewhere in the fog. About the most religious experience I’ve ever had in Louisiana: coming back from a dance late at night and driving over this flat land and, all of a sudden, seeing these waves of light going up and down in this thick fog. Just incredible!”
https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/arts/article_3add9b2e-efd5-5805-9993-8d2aee028483.html
Leo Villareal
“Leo Villareal is a contemporary American artist best known for his installations employing LED lights and computer technology. Through customizing the codes himself, Villareal creates shifting light patterns in each installation, as seen in his Multiverse (2008). “Art is a distillation of ideas into material through which artists communicate. For me, art has always served as a portal—something that takes the viewer to another place,” he has explained. Born in 1967 in Albuquerque, NM, Villareal studied set design and sculpture at Yale University before attending New York University’s interactive telecommunications program at the Tisch School of the Arts. He was influenced by the work of James Turrell and Dan Flavin as well as the structures and systems of Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings. The artist has gone on to make a number of temporary and permanent public installations, including The Bay Lights (2013) which spans the western part of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, taken down in 2015, the city had it reinstalled permanently a year later. Villareal currently lives and works in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, among others.” http://www.artnet.com/artists/leo-villareal/
Particle Universe, (2016) Leo Villareal (1967) at The Parrish Art Museum
Click here to view this kinetic artwork https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apHNVT3EXns
More work by artists who explore light and colour in their work. https://www.phillips.com/article/4600555/let-there-be-light-9-contemporary-artists-reimagine-the-relationship-between-light-and-art