Color and meaning (color temperature, part 2)

Composition VII, 1913, by Wassily Kandinsky.

Three artists arrived at the idea of pure abstraction at roughly the same time: Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich. This was not coincidence; all three believed in the spiritual properties of abstraction, an idea they got from the rich stew of spiritualism swirling around turn-of-the-century Europe.

One of the chief promoters of the Fourth Dimension was Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, a follower of G. I. Gurdjieff. Ouspenskii believed our consciousness was evolving, which would ultimately lead us to perceive the fourth dimension, and that art and music were the path to this evolution.  In the fourth dimension, reality and unreality were reversed, and time and motion were revealed as illusions.

Theosophy was Madame Blavatsky’s occult movement. She described it as “the archaic Wisdom-Religion, the esoteric doctrine once known in every ancient country having claims to civilization.” Madame Blavatsky taught that color had spiritual vibrations which would awaken the dormant spirituality within a person, and that art should begin in nature, a nature that would be found in a world-birthing apocalypse.

A fully realized theory must include the proper colors for shapes. The passive and dull circle deserves a correspondingly dull blue. The energetic triangle ought to be rendered in a dangeresqueyellow.

Rudolph Steiner's spin on theosophy was called Anthroposophy.  This postulated the existence of an objective spiritual world accessible through inner development of the clairvoyance and intuition that modern man had lost as he developed rational thought. Steiner focused on the symbolic and synesthetic properties of color.

And then there are angles, which should be matched in aggression with their colors.

Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) is both turgid and broad-ranging. Let me just hit his major points about color:

• Colors evoke both a purely physical effect on the eye and a vibration of the soul or an “inner resonance.”
• The elements of color are warmth or coolness, and clarity or obscurity. 
• Warmth means yellow, and coolness means blue, so yellow and blue form the first great contrast. Yellow has an eccentric movement and blue a concentric movement; a yellow surface seems to move closer to us, while a blue surface seems to move away. Yellow is a terrestrial color: mad, disturbed and violent. Blue is a celestial color, deeply calm but sinking toward the mourning of black. The combination of blue and yellow (green) yields total immobility.
• Clarity is a tendency towards white, and obscurity is a tendency towards black. White and black form the second great contrast, which is static. White is a deep, absolute silence, full of possibility. Black is nothingness, an eternal silence without hope (death). 
• The mixing of white with black gives gray, which possesses no active force and is similar in tonality to green. Gray is frozen immobility; dark grays tend toward despair, but even lightening gray yields very little hope.
• Red is a warm color, forceful, lively and agitated. Mixed with black it becomes brown, which is a dull, hard, inhibited color. Mixed with yellow, red gains in warmth and becomes orange, which irradiates and energizes its surroundings. When red is mixed with blue it moves away from man to become morbid and mourning purple. Red and green form the third great contrast, and orange and purple the fourth.

In short, Kandinsky's color theory is a magnificent exercise in hooey. Still, it has had a long-reaching influence, with overtones in fashion, industrial design, and every other area that touches our lives.

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Color Temperature, part one

The idea of “warm” and “cool” colors was first posited by the English miniaturist and teacher Charles Hayter. The illustration is from his treatise, Perspective, published in 1813.

The way we perceive color is greatly influenced by our experience. We all know that fire is hot and ice is cold, so we perceive reddish orange as a “hot” color and blue as a “cold” color. This association is so strong that painters, photographers, interior designers and fashion designers can all use it color temperature as emotional shorthand.

This association actually flies in the face of physics. While we call colors over 5000K cool, and colors below 3000K warm, the actual physics of the matter are exactly opposite—the shorter the wavelength, the higher the temperature.

Goethe's color wheel, 1809.

That “warm” and “cool” are subjective is demonstrated by the fact that different painters learn the hottest and coolest points differently. I understand blue-violet as the coolest color, while one of my painting students—an art teacher herself—learned blue to be the coolest tone. And look at this attemptto quantify color temperature by a Chinese-American painter; he seems to be putting aqua at the coldest point.

The first color wheel we know of was created by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the first of a long line of philosophers to concern themselves with the meaning of color. He wrote: “The chromatic circle... [is] arranged in a general way according to the natural order... for the colours diametrically opposed to each other in this diagram are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye. Thus, yellow demands violet; orange [demands] blue; purple [demands] green; and vice versa: thus... all intermediate gradations reciprocally evoke each other; the simpler colour demanding the compound, and vice versa…”

The “rose of temperaments” (1798-99) by Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, matched human occupations and character traits to colors. I don’t read German, but I swear my red couch qualifies me to be a tyrant.

So far, so awesome. Unfortunately, Goethe also included aesthetic values in his color wheel, titling them the “allegorical, symbolic, mystic use of colour.” That was an idea that developed a life of its own.

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So you can't draw a straight line, redux.

Martha's first painting. And for those who know us too well, let me say up front that that's not a whisky bottle.

You may remember my friend Amy telling me last summer that she couldn’t draw a straight line, and me challengingher to let me teachher. Her sister Martha was in town this week, and she asked me if she could come to my painting class on Saturday.

Like Amy, Martha has a doctorate from a prestigious American university. She also recently went back and got an MS in landmark preservation from an art school. However, the last time Martha actually took a hands-on art class was when she was a freshman at Brighton High School. (By my calculations, that must have been at least twenty years ago.)

Her sketch for the same.

Here is her drawing, and here is her painting—both done in a single three-hour class.

“This is some kind of parlor trick,” my daughter Laura told me afterward. “You take people who ‘can’t do art’ and in three hours prove to them that they can.”

Well, duh, honey. Most people believe the lie that art is magic, rather than craft. And the methodology for teachingdrawing and painting has become impossibly corrupted in modern America (with a few notable exceptions). Yes, I'm repeating myself here, but I'll continue to do so as long as people believe the lie that they can't draw.

If you’re interested, there is more information on my fall classes here.

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A personal aside

Selbstbildnis, mit der Hand an der Stirn (Self-portrait, hand at the forehead), etching, 1910, by Käthe Kollwitz,  

Forty-five years ago, I was at a school pool in Niagara County, New York, when my sister had a brain bleed. She died. With us were my friend S. and her mom, although at the time they seemed tangential to the tragedy that engulfed my family.

It was compounded four years later when my brother—who happened to be S.’s classmate—was killed by a drunk driver.

Sorrowful old man, pencil, black lithographic crayon, wash, white opaque watercolor, on watercolor paper, by Vincent Van Gogh, 1882

We move on. Our flock tends to be made of birds of the same coloration. And I think I’m probably an unmotivated intellectual. Why, just yesterday, I was discussing Steiner and Kandinsky and their daft color theories with three dear friends. This is fun, it’s fluff, and no more or less meaningful than talking football is for other people.

I haven’t seen S. in years, but through the miracle of Facebook, we’re in loose contact.

Last evening, my mom died. I refuse to discuss my grief with anyone, but it is substantial.

And then S. posted this video:

For the first time I understand what it meant to praise God from the depths of grief. That’s wisdom, and it’s a far greater thing than knowledge.

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Itinerant painters (2 of 2)

This version of The Peaceable Kingdom, from the mid-1840s, includes William Penn negotiating with Native Americans. He often included this in the paintings as an example of how disparate peoples could work together in peace.

Perhaps the most famous early American itinerant painter was the Quaker pastor, Edward Hicks.

Hicks was born in 1780 to Anglican parents, but his mother’s early death resulted in him being raised in a Quaker family.

An earlier iteration shows the influence of decorative painting on Hicks' canvas work. We call him 'primitive' but his interest in design over realism actually seems very modern in retrospect.

At the age of 13, Hicks was apprenticed to a coach-making firm, where he learned the craft of decorative painting. He stayed there for seven years before moving on as a journeyman coach and house painter. He was accepted into the Society of Friends in 1803 and married a fellow Quaker that same year.

By 1813, Hicks was traveling as an itinerant preacher. Like St. Paul supporting his ministry with tent-making, Hicks supported his ministry with decorative painting. This, unfortunately, annoyed some of his Quaker brethren, who felt that decorative painting was at odds with Quaker principles. He gave up painting in favor of farming, but that decision was a financial disaster.

This version of The Peaceable Kingdom, from 1829-30, includes Quakers bearing banners.

Unlike St. Paul, Hicks had a growing family. Necessity forced him to resume decorative painting. He reeled off the first of many copies of The Peaceable Kingdom by 1820. Ironically, most of his canvases were not done for money, but for the edification of friends and family. In his lifetime, he was known as a preacher, and his living came from painting decorative objects.

Hicks painted an astonishing 61 iterations of The Peaceable Kingdom, which illustrates Isaiah 11:6-8:

The wolf will live with the lamb,
    the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
    and a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
    their young will lie down together,
    and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
    and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.

That he painted it over and over tells us much about his intention, which was to share and teach the Bible. It was a humble aspiration in opposition to his contemporary art scene (which I wrote about in a series of posts starting here).

The Cornell Farm, 1848. Hicks may not have had the classically-trained artist's ability to render spatial depth in a landscape, but he sure did understand animals. 

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Itinerant painters (1 of 2)

Historical Monument of the American Republic, finally finished in 1888, was Field’s most famous painting. It was rejected for the Centennial Exposition, which it was painted to commemorate.

As I traveled from event to event this summer, people would ask me whether I was interested in doing this or that upcoming show. With the rise of plein air events, it would be easy to carve out a life as an itinerant painter, going from place to place all year long. I’m not planning to do it, but we have a tradition of itinerant painters in this country and its romance does kind of bewitch me.

Erastus Salisbury Field was a 19th century itinerant folk painter. Most of Field’s life was spent in western Massachusetts and the Connecticut Valley, although he did do two stints in New York City.

Woman with a Green Book (possibly Louisa Gallond Cook), 1838, was one of many itinerant portraits painted by Field before photography made this business obsolete.

By age 19, Field had displayed sufficient drawing chops to be taken as a student by Samuel F. B. Morse—yes, that Morse, who was a well-known painter and teacher besides being the inventor of the single-wire telegraph and the Morse code. Field’s few short months with Morse were the sum total of his formal education in painting. After Morse abruptly closed his teaching studio, Field returned to Massachusetts with enough technique to set up shop as an itinerant decorative painter and portrait painter.

In the 1840s, Field answered the siren call of New York again, relocating his family to Greenwich Village. After seven years, he was called back to Massachusetts to manage his ailing father’s farm.

The Garden of Eden, c. 1860, by Erastus Field.

It’s believed that Field studied the nascent art of photography in New York, but whether that’s true or not, he certainly saw the handwriting on the wall. He turned from painting portraits to painting landscapes and history and Bible scenes. His most famous work, The Historical Monument of the American Republic, is a complex metaphor for American history. He worked on it for 21 years. He was a terrifically productive painter, with about 300 works still surviving.

Field died at home on June 28, 1900 at the age of 95.

Field’s granddaughter-several-times-removed was my friend in Lewiston in the 1980s. She was also a talented and largely self-trained artist.

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The Open Road (continued)

Landscape with a Carriage and a Train, Vincent van Gogh, 1890

Yesterday, I wrote about contemporary paintings of the open road. These would be impossible without photography or the automobile, so they are very much of our time.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, people moved around on foot, by horse, or by ship. While there were genre painters dealing with those subjects, the mechanics of life did not particularly interest artists or their patrons. The social realism (or naturalism) movement of the 19^thcentury changed that. Its concern with the lives of the working class included the ways in which people travelled.

Vincent van Gogh painted Landscape with a Carriage and a Train shortly before his death, after he had left the asylum at Saint-Rémy. “Lately I’ve been working a lot and quickly; by doing so I’m trying to express the desperately swift passage of things in modern life,” he wrote.

The Third-Class Carriage, Honoré Daumier, 1864

The Third-Class Carriage by Honoré Daumier is the most well-known, and perhaps the earliest, depiction of mass transit, which has become such a fact of life in our modern existence.

Third-class railway carriages were dirty, crowded, and uncomfortable. They were filled with the lower orders. In short, they were the coach seats of their day. While the little family in the front row of Daumier's painting are fully delineated, the figures in the back rapidly dissolve into the anonymity of the endless human crowd.

Steaming Streets by George Bellows (1908) is a harshly honest look at urban transport. No Currier and Ives romanticism here.

In our nostalgic imaginings we like to believe we would have achieved a first-class railway ticket, but the vast majority of us would have been traveling coach then, just as we do now.

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