Forests of Imagination

Using colour creatively/Finding our colour palette.

talk by Padmayogini/Wendy Le Ber 2007

The final aspect of my talk, brings in some thing about how a few artists have used colour, the colour wheel which I’ll pass round, which might give you a few ways in to finally decide which colours you might begin to work with. So I’ll start off by passing round this colour wheel, I like these sorts of colour wheels because you can move them round and start to see the colour changes as well as the complementary colours and so on. You don’t have to remember any of the colour wheel today it’s just for interest. Apparently during the Renaissance artists like Leonardo used Four primary colours, red, yellow, blue and green, rather than just the Three primary colours of red, blue and yellow that we use today. The primary colours (red, blue and yellow) are the three colours that cannot be produced by mixing any other colours together.

By looking at the colour wheel you get a taste of how many colours you can start to mix from the Three primaries and if you think back to the earlier exercise, you probably thought of a lot of different colours then as well As I mentioned earlier the eye can distinguish many thousands of colours, though they will not all be named, though you can name yours. I thought of another one, chaffinch pink, the slight pink blush on the male chaffinch birds breast! That may be enough for you to have some idea of the colour I mean, especially if you watch the birds, or are interested in them.

However, colour also remains quite subjective. Although we have agreed as it were what the main colours are, we don’t really know if we are seeing exactly the same colour as someone else.

It’s often recommended that students start off by experimenting with the Three primary colours, and you may also want to do that finding your own colours to work with, or you just might want to use some of the lovely colours we have already available.

There is something quite seductive about colour, as Lama Govinder says, colour touches our emotions, and the advertising world has made good use of this. A lot of the pieces I’ve brought in for collage today have highly coloured adverts on them. Though the shared language of colour can be different in different cultures, and changes through time, acquiring different associations. For instance the colour red has been seen by advertisers as one to draw people in, to create a buzz and so on. But actually today the use of the colour red in every sale across the land has brought an association of cheapness to the colour now. Though as it’s still being used for sales perhaps it still works.

I’m increasingly drawn to artist’s who are working with colour and light, I sent information to those of you on our e-mail list about the exhibition at Kinetica, in Spitalfields. I have some images from their exhibitions here for you to look at as well.
I also went to an exhibition of Daniel Buren’s work in Oxford, the exhibition catalogue is here in suitable brightly coloured form. I was particularly struck by the effect of the light on his work. Which was an installation of panels of Perspex, window like, in response to the windows in the gallery. There were different coloured panes in the panels, which were suspended from the ceiling, and you could walk round them.
As you moved around the space you saw continually changing patterns of colour and when the sun shone colours were reflected on the walls and ceiling.
There were obvious references to stained glass in the work and perhaps the spiritual, going up to see it on a cold January day, I was left joyful and energised in this room of light and colour.

I have recently been investigating the artist Josef Albers, who was a pupil and teacher at the Bauhaus in Germany. Which was a very famous school of art and design. When the Nazis closed down the school in 1933, Josef and his wife Anni, also an artist, moved to America, where he taught art with an emphasis on colour.
He worked on a series Homage’s to the Square from 1950 until his death in 1976. Some examples are here. These are works all concerned with colour and colour relationships. Albers was fascinated by how colours were perceived, particularly how a colour seemed to change when put next to another one.
There is an exhibition of some of these paintings at the Waddington gallery I’ve just found out until March 27th. So you might have chance to seen some work in the flesh, so to speak if you are interested in following him up. He wrote a seminal book on colour called Interaction of colour in 1963, which I don’t have yet.

You might be familiar with the work of Howard Hodgkin, or David Hockney, both painters I like whose work is often filled with colour or concerned to find the equivalents for places and emotions through colour. We have some books here again for you to look at.
You also might be familiar with Mark Rothko’s work, perhaps the room filled with his work at Tate Modern. A lot of people find spiritual qualities in his work. It might be interesting to see what response you have to his work, which is abstract in form, if you haven’t seen them.
So we have come to the end of my talk, I hope you have been given some ways to approach the day, we will be choosing our colour palette soon, and you can put into practise the ideas you have been forming.