Arbitrary color & your last chance to see a great show at The Met
Do you want to know what the greatest artistic leap that happens in my painting class is? It isn’t when people learn how to shade an apple in order to capture the light hitting it and the shadows that light casts. It isn’t when they learn to paint with split-complimentary colors. It isn’t even when they figure out Renaissance perspective. It is when they realize that they don’t have to paint a tree green and brown.
L'Estaque, turning road, André Derain, 1906
In my book there is an entire chapter dedicated to this moment of leaving the earthbound palette behind because it is not an easy adjustment for a new painter to make. Or an old painter for that matter. Or any painter at all, really, except for kids who could care less about your stupid rules about apples being red. To many of us adults, freedom to make whatever you want is fairly overwhelming.
Imagine that a person has worked so hard for months to acquire the skills necessary to accurately mix the color of an orange’s rind and the color of the shadow on its underbelly. They have figured out how to get that bit of hot light on the top of the orange the exact vibrant yellow-orange color and they have about twenty different hues in there, reflecting the endless varieties of color in a real life orange. And then I come along and suggest that they paint the orange lime green.
We become intoxicated with color, with words that speak of color, and with the sun that makes colors brighter.
Andre Derain
There is some terminology to know here. The actual color of an object when you remove shadow and light and all of that is called the local color of an object. For example, the local color of an orange is orange. The local color of a red rose would be a red rose and a green stem. Or in the case of this Matisse painting, the yellow lemon is painted its local color - yellow.
A perceived color is the color of that orange the painters I mentioned earlier are trying so hard to recreate. A desire to match a perceived color is why your mix a million different orange hues to paint a solitary orange. In the painting below, Gauguin painted the perceived color of the oranges and their flesh.
Arbitrary color is when you don’t care what the color in front of you is and you paint the orange any color you want to paint it, including an unnatural color like lime green, like Picasso does here. When you are painting arbitrary colors you are more interested in capturing a vibe, an emotion, an energy, a dreamscape. Your focus is not in recreating the world as our optic system sends it to our brain - your focus is in provoking some response in the viewer, supercharging your own relationship to the object you are painting or the painting itself, or, trying to create art with abandon. And when artists were finally able to paint with arbitrary colors without being chased out of town, beret in hand, it was a big deal.
Art history loves a good story and there is a good story connected to artists first using arbitrary color. Good friends Henri Matisse and Andre Derain were spending the summer in the South of France together while engaging in a friendly rivalry about who could be make the better painting, this competitive spirit is often the case when artists get together. (If you have ever spent time in an art school studio, you definitely know this is true.)
There is a fantastic show up at The Metropolitan Museum called Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism that is about this friendship and the arbitrary color art movement, Fauvism, which resulted from it. (You only have 9 days left to see it!)
Fishing Boats, Collioure (Bateaux, pêcheurs, Collioure) Andre Derain
As always, the content team at The Met puts it better than I could:
“Their fabled partnership in the small fishing village of Collioure would forever change the course of French painting. In freewheeling experiments, they explored color and light on the beaches and in the surrounding hills, exercises that led their contemporaries to reconsider the nature of brushwork and the role of color in their practice. When the astonishing new paintings were shown at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, critics derided their radical departure from convention. One critic called these artists les Fauves (literally “wild beasts”).”
Seascape (Beside the Sea) (Marine bord de Mer)), Henri Matisse
Look at the paintings that emerged!
Sailboats (Voiliers), Andre Derain
Landscape at Colliore, Study for the Joy of Life, Henri Matisse
So my challenge to you this weekend is to try to be arbitrary in your next painting and reject what your eyes are seeing. Paint a bowl of red lemons, a landscape of pink trees, and a field of purple snow. Maybe invite a friend over and get weirdly competitive with them. Personally, I’m going to crank up some old French songs from the 1900s and paint a landscape where everything is tourquise and pink. Everything. I’ll report back.
Thank you for reading and subscribing and all of the those supportive things.
x
Sara
www.thepaintingschool.org
www.sarawoster.com
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