It’s A Colorful Life

Studio Project: Artist Response Artwork

Color Research: Encouragement banners

“I know who holds tomorrow”

Bridget Riley “Crest” 1964, emulsion on board, 65 1/4” x 65 1/4”.

The first artwork I chose for this week’s color focus assignment was “Crest” by Bridget Riley. Bridget Riley is an artist who primarily focuses on Op art, which is illusionist geometric form of abstraction art. What makes Riley’s work so significant is her ability to create movement. This is called kinetic art. For year, Riley created this kinetic artwork, using repetitive shapes and lines with varying or equal distance between one another.  Her work eventually gained popularity around the 1960′s. As I read more about her purpose in creating these illusions, I found that she admired at how we see and wanted to recreate this incredible experience, sharing her wonder with the world. For years and years, Riley only used black and white in her art. I believe she used black and white because she saw them to be the most dynamic colors when placed together, stimulating the viewers eyes and warping their vision with the repetitive lines and the fluid curves. Their color and positioning is intention to recreate a feeling, a movement, an illusion, an experience as best as possible. The monochrome simplicity allows her to focus on the lines and the lengths that they are. The obvious creativity, vision, and fluid motion makes this art jump off and move on the page, fitting perfectly in the upcoming genre of performance art. 

Odilon Redon “The Eye, like a Strange Balloon, Mounts toward Infinity”, 1882, lithograph, 10 5/16” x 7 11/16.

Q: What is the role of the artist?

Life Color Post: Week #15

Here’s some color I found this week....

1.) The first image is called a “sunshine box.” My family received this box filled with all yellow things, making it fit its name. As an encouragement, some people from my dad’s work sent this to us anonymously to encourage us through this tough season. It truly did brighten my day, especially with the immediate effect yellow has on me.

2.) The second picture is a beautiful Gibson guitar. My boyfriend just added this to his collection of guitars and we both couldn’t stop obsessing over the sunburst red-to-orange fade in contrast to the white pick guard, giving it a retro look for sure. All of his other guitars are either black, white, or simple wood so it was bold and fun to break up the monotony with color. 

3.) The third picture is artwork by Karen Cheok, an artist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I follow her artwork account on instagram and when I came across this picture of the hands painted on the black background, I felt it was a perfect example of studying the power of color. As I took a few moments to analyze this work, I started to ask myself what each hand was supposed to represent, and why each color was on each hand. These are liberties that Cheok had to take and her intentionality is obvious. Each painted hand has a different feeling, not just because of the positions they are in, but because of their distinct colors.

4.) The fourth image is another instagram artist I follow named Beverly Salas who is based in Orange County, California. Her work consistently follows the theme of psychedelic paired with retro/classic looks. She tends to use black and white images in collages or drawings, and then overlays the rest of it in a wild use of color and patterns in order to give off the psychedelic vibes. Her use of color demands attention and hard to ignore, but also vividly interesting as all the color combinations contrast each another but also bring out one another as well.

6 Theories of Color Relationships

In this chapter, the author takes time to explain the many theories surrounding the study of color. While there are probably many different theories out there, there are six main concepts that have formed color theory today. Each one built off the other, with each researcher debating back and forth with one another’s ideas and beliefs. This means that not only one theory is right, but all share in today’s study of color. The process of documented color exploration began all the back in the time of Aristotle, other Greek philosophers, Arab physicists, and Hindu Upanishads. They agreed and determined all color originated from one place. This one place was light and different kinds of light created different colors somehow. Leonardo Da Vinci took these ideas and found the ways colors could juxtapose one another to create depth, backgrounds, and foregrounds, also known as, simultaneous contrast. Next, Isaac Newton studied light further in order to figure out how color differentiated itself, as well as how it could be intense or dilute based off the amount of light. Moses Harris followed Newton, but instead worked with pigments rather than light. He established the primary and compound colors and studied the concepts of shades and tints. Wolfgang, the poet, disagreed with and attacked Newton’s proposals about light, leading him to focus on how the eye determines light, making it a primarily visual experience. He even studied how shadows could be seen as different hues. Runge came after Wolfgang, creating a 3-dimensional model of color. Michel Eugene Chevreul used Runge’s ideas and founded the beliefs about analogous color combinations which gave paintings new found brilliance and dimension. Another researcher who believe light and color to be an individual, unique experience was Ogden Rood. He identified the variables of purity, luminosity, and hue as the requirements for differentiating between colors. Munsell and Otswald were researchers that followed suit in the others’ footsteps, exploring more the different types and variations of possible colors, working to define as many as they could while still maintaining science to create these color combinations.

Additional Research: 

Gerhard Richter (1932-) “Bomber”, 1963, oil on canvas, 51 1/4” x 70 3/4”, Städtische Galerie, Wolfsburg, Germany

For this week’s color focus, I chose to research more about Gerhard Richter’s painting. “Bomber” was made right after the second World War. To describe his reasons for painting these series of planes, Richter talked about his fascination with war he had as a boy. At first, he envied the soldiers, but it took one to rebuke him for thinking the way he did for Richter to put an end to his outward interest. Richter talked a lot about his use of grey in his paintings. He called grey, “the ideal color for indifference, fence-sitting, keeping quiet, despair." These are words that could describe the truth about war as well. Waiting, quiet, blank, despair, tragedy, black and white, fear, politics and sides, etc. These all can be used to depict not only war, but the color of grey. The combination of these two only enforces that. Adding in color would completely alter the purpose. One person even depicted grey in terms of his works as a “veil” showing “deadpan impassivity.” I really liked this image the writer conveyed: a veil draping over the scene. I think that summarizes Richter intentions well. He once was fascinated by and envied the soldiers in the planes, but as he grew older he realized the tragedy that followed the appearance of those planes. To an artist, war tends to be dramatic and romantic, yet as a pop-artist from Germany, he was forced to not take anything seriously, which also makes his efforts to paint scenes of war even more intriguing. As I did more research, I found that Richter commonly used different objects to convey the color grey appropriately. He would find and compile these objects, then match them to the grey hues he was studying. Together, the objects would be used for some of his art pieces. Richter’s painted series of planes was at the beginning of the Capitalist-Realism which was a form of German Pop-Art. This movement was a result of the political uproar, terror, and making sense of the confusion of war at the time. 

https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2017/february/13/what-is-it-with-gerhard-richter-and-grey/

Life Color Post: Week #14

Lots of color in the media this week! Trying to get more creative with different colorful outlets due to quarantine.... 

1.) Intriguing Print by Tishk Barzanji. Digital Giclée Print. Printed on Hahnemuhle Museum Etching 350gsm card. --- I came across this print and immediately was drawn to the red tones that fill this picture. I loved the dreamy, evening hue coming from the apparent windows on the side of the room. It gives a fierce, fiery feel, but it’s almost all slowed down because of how the shadows are cast. The artist creates lots of similar art and is known for their surrealist urban art. Tishk Barzanji is based in London and was established in 1997.

https://www.opumo.com/us/tishk-barzanji/

2.) The second image is a graphic design piece created by Nicholas Huggins. I came across this piece while looking for more art inspiration in my own work. I loved the pop of colors used to give the solemn or serious portrait a fun, comic, pop-art tone. The triadic twist of color combination gives off a simplistic theme to match the black and white of the original image. 

https://www.instagram.com/nicholashugginsdesign/

3.) The third image of the painted terrain with the sun and mountains in the distance grabbed my attention as I was researching some minimalist artwork. The colors caught my attention with its use of analogous and monochromatic pallet. The red-pink-orange-salmon hues indicate the sun’s movement providing depth to the piece. In addition, when I went to research more about it, I found it is being sold for €35,00, or $38,057.25 in the United States. WHAT! 

Exclusive Caeli artwork (each made unique). "Breathe In, Breathe Out" by Rae from Art Bohème. https://caelideco.com/products/air-painting

4.) Image by Claire Luxton, photographer and art designer. The obvious theme of green present in her eye and highlighted more by the circle of leaves creates a wild, natural, organic tone to the picture. The green is definitely a statement. I looked at more of Luxton’s work and saw how other colors were used in the same way in her series. Each color of eye with a natural element give each picture intentional story lines. Interesting how her series seemed like a color theory research experiment and how much each color leaves room for a different interpretation of a similar image. 

Q: In what ways do artists work with restrictions and rules? How might restrictions or rules help to form ideas?

Color Research: Easter Cards 2020

Life Color Post Week #13 PT. 2!

Life Color Post: Week #13

1.) Photo one documents my effort to make color-coordinates cards for a game my group and I had to invent on our own for our Development Psychology. I was assigned to make the ‘color’ deck so I made one for 8 different basic colors.

2.) Photo two is a pool named “The Library” which is found in Koh Samui, Thailand. It is known for its blood-red tiles that make the water turn bright red. Because of this is has been listed as apart of the top 10 most dangerous swimming pools in the world. I found this when watching a random video on YouTube with my dad on the other 10 most dangerous pools. I found it interesting that because the water was red instead of the normal blue/green/clear that pools usually are, it tends to make people more anxious, tense, and unable to swim.

Q: What distinguishes visual art from design? What distinguishes visual art from craft?

Visual art and design can be seem very similar but there is a definite difference between them. I see design as having a purpose to create by conveying a direct message or to satisfy its audience. Visual art while it may be an aspect to design is more about creating from simple inspiration and allowing it to become what it does with freedom and without guidelines or much structure. Design usually has underlying rules that allow the piece to make sense in the space that it is in.