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color notes, week 1

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I’m collaborating on a site specific installation at Concordia University next month with my friend Laura Goble. This first images shows an image of the lobby like space where we will be installing our work and a pile of the materials I’ve been collecting for the project. We are limiting the conceptual scope of our project to gallery space itself, its colors, signage, etc. as the primary direct content for the work we are making to highlight how much information is present in a space and how a space contributes to the meaning of any artwork place within it. 

Digging my outfit yesterday with its full range of values plus yellow, green and red violet, an example of a split complimentary color scheme. Of course it’s hard to see in the image, but I love the idea of making color harmonies into outfits...

Saw this artist installation in my feed and I’m really drawn to the combination of the installation strategy and with what should be, for me, a boring color palette that here seems fresh. I’m going to keep my eye on the artist, Jens Fange. This work keeps me thinking.

This is another screenshot from instagram. I like the look of the circles in what could feel similar to the kinds of grid color studies we do in color theory, but it has more softness and movement that makes it fun to look at as a composition, not as sterile as pure color research. Plus 1970s. Plus Rainbow. Don't know anything about this artist. Maybe I should...

organic reddish color

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Sample Introduction Post

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The first two images are from a solo exhibition of my work from September of 2018 at Azusa Pacific University called “love is an action word”. I’m very proud of the show because it was probably the most brave exhibition I’ve ever made to date, where I took lots of risks and tried new unfamiliar things like performance, making zines, and inviting other artists to have exhibitions within my sculpture. The first image is an installation view of the exhibition and the second image is a detail view of some of the small scale toy sculptures that were in the show and were used in the exhibition promotion materials. 

The third image is some buttons I made showing the logo of an artist-run exhibition project I’m working to start this year with some friends called Painting and Sculpture Outpost. We are hoping to create at least 4 art exhibitions this year in Marysville and I’m really excited about creating opportunities for my community to experience art and for artists I’m interested in to show and connect to new communities. Our first show is in the works, and is tentatively scheduled for late February...

This last image is a view of “The Dinner Party” by artist Judy Chicago from back in 1974-1979 . I’ve known about her work for a long time now, but am recently revisiting it as I was reminded of it in the women in art history class I’m taking this semester for fun. I think i’ve always been in awe of Judy Chicago the person and less Judy Chicago the artist, but I find myself impressed by the scope of this project in my looking at it now, its materiality and research and hopefulness, the community that created it, and the lasting impacts of it.

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studio experiments in color: woven color flags

I’ve been going through some old wovens that are sitting unused and decide to try reworking them into small flags with names of colors embroidered on them. I’ve been thinking about flags for a while, but more recently about the idea of prayer flags and the power of naming. As one way to think through the subjectivity of color and the way language intersects with color, I’ve made 4 of these so far with several more in progress. I’m imagining them as a collective entity of modular units but also as small drawings. I have no idea if these will go anywhere, but am putting them here for now to peculate....whatever happens after that....

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Colour is enslaved by line that becomes writing

Yves Klein as quoted in the “Hanunoo” chapter of the text “Chromophobia” by David Batchelor

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Yves Klein and International Klein Blue

From a description of a blue monochrome painting by Klein from the Museum of Modern Art in New York:

“Monochrome abstraction—the use of one color over an entire canvas—has been a strategy adopted by many painters wishing to challenge expectations of what an image can and should represent. Klein likened monochrome painting to an "open window to freedom." He worked with a chemist to develop his own particular brand of blue. Made from pure color pigment and a binding medium, it is called International Klein Blue. Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own particular utopian vision of the world.”

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international Klein blue

Table Bleue, 1961 by Yves Klein

The Venet Foundation in Le Muy is had a show this past summer to celebrate its fifth anniversary and the 90th anniversary of Yves Klein’s birth. The exhibition titled “Pure Pigment” is devoted to Yves Klein and features a vast installation of pigments applied directly on the floor covering 200 square meters of the foundation. This is an installation shot of the show.

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a few Additive Color mixing perspectives

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quick snapshots taken at the Sikh parade in Yuba City, CA last weekend, so much color inspiration everywhere....

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image above:

A “colour cube for the colour charts” cut out from “Color Mixing by Numbers” written by Alfred Hickethier. Hickenthier developed his color system in the years 1950-1952 in collaboration with a laboratory in West Germany.  The text was published in 1963.

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What is paint after all? Colored dirt.

Philip Guston as quoted in “Bright Earth” by Philip Ball (page 24)

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color scan experiments

I extracted all the cards from my previously made decks that have color references to create a new color deck. This new color deck became the basis for some scan play I did this week, making scanned images intuitively based on color descriptions using colored paper and found photos from an album that I picked up by a dumpster in Paris.

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the cards I drew from the color deck

a composite scan of colors and images I chose intuitively based on the cards, and some consecutive scans using these materials

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Grays and Greiges

I’ve been reading about a basic color experiment where you find a white object and look at in a white space under different lighting conditions to begin to sense the range and implications of how diversely we see and perceive deceptively simply named colors like white, how slippery color really is.

That being said, when I was sitting in the kitchen just now, where I do my messier studying, I look out into the living room with natural light coming into the space through a central window. All the walls in the house are painted the same creamy beige color, a very warm grey neutral, and from where I’m sitting, this warm gray color, lit differently, is a paintingful of hues, a bit of my own suburban version of the color experiment I keep reading about.

I tried to take a picture of this color experience to start this post. I’m posting this mostly as a reflection of a color moment. I like the idea of collecting quick color reflections and writing them out here, color being so subjective and connected to the individual that it requires, in some proportion, a written descriptive component to it’s study, perhaps.

Then in thinking about this particular color I’ve lived with in so many of my previous rented homes and apartments, I learned a new color word: greige, defined online as as “a color between beige and gray”. (This could be a whole new research area to explore at some point, so I mention it here, perhaps to save for later investigation.)

In my experience, my domestic rented spaces have generally been dominated by these creamy greiges, warm gray and beige neutrals walls, sometimes called “designer colors” in real estate advertisements, and that is the life color story that I’ve been given as the desirable starting point in home building.  Today I also found these infographics about which colors to paint your house so that it sells, with these greiges dominating the desirable range for economic prosperity.

I’m not attempting to make a statement exactly with these reflections, just collecting this cultural information here, all color related, as I think more about the suburban and its relationship to color and the domestic spaces that dominate our lives and how they relate to color. As I think about how color relates to capitalism, real estate, the most possible profit....

images from top:

view from my kitchen

several infographics on the most sellable shades to paint your home for a quick to rent or sell quickly

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Artist Spotlight: Peter Halley

a few selected excerpts from an interview of the artist with Kathryn Hixon in 1992…

KH… You began using Day-Glo colours in 1981 and 1982. Why did you decide to use Day-Glo pigment straight out of the jar?

PH…The work has always had a cinematic or narrative quality. Specifically I began to think that some form of energy was moving through the conduits and illuminating the cells. I started using Day-Glo red to make the cells glow. I was trying to emphasize technologically derived materials and I also liked Day-Glo’s connection to Pop and Psychedelia, in a nostalgic sense. The quality of the glow that it produced seemed very artificial, unnatural and eerie to me. In a quite traditional way, I have always been interested in light in painting.

KH…How would you describe the interactions of colours that you use?

PH…It is not about colour, but rather how the color combines. It is entirely linguistic.

KH…Within traditional painting, do you think of the colors associations with different aspects of culture? Putting a dull brown next to a pale blue is almost nauseating.

PH…After I do them I sometimes think of the associations with bad taste. But what really specifically interests me is that the use of colour can be transgressive. I find it exciting if I can make some awkward colour or combination of colours work. The other thing I have been intersted in since 1988 is the idea of spatial ambiguity, a confusion between background and form, that’s like the phenomenon of synaesthesia or psychedelic overload.

KH…Each of your paintings is viscerally direct and has immediate impact as a unifed whole.

PH…I strongly believe in making art that cna be looked at quickly. We live in a society of informational and cultural overload. The idea of a Cezanne, for example, which you can study for hours and various nuances are revealed seems out of touch, at least with my own psychic life. I want to make something explosive and immediate. And hopefully explosive and immediate each time you go by and take a quick look at it.

interview bits sourced from page 199-201 of “COLOUR” Edited by David Batchelor from the Documents of Contemporary Art book series published by Whitechapel and the MIT Press.

images above are all works by Peter Halley:

Yellow Cell with Conduits, 1985, Acrylic, fluorescent acrylic and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 64 x 72 inches

A Monstrous Paradox, 1989, Acrylic, fluorescent acrylic and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 90 ¼ x 195 inches

Prison, 1989, Acrylic, fluorescent acrylic and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 83 ¼ x 119 ¼ inches

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“A Color Removed” by Michael Rakowitz

I came across an installation of orange objects by artists Michael Rakowitz in the October issue of Art in America. It was an exhibition that was part of Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art on view July 14th to September 30th around Cleveland, Ohio.

It seemed to me like an interesting way that color is being used by a contemporary artist.

From the projects website:

"If you want to know how a system works, introduce a coloring agent." -Emily Binet Royall A Color Removed is a city-wide participatory project grounded in the impossible gesture of removing the color orange from Cleveland and suspending its future use. The presence of orange, as a symbol of safety, encourages complacency. But what if we could trust that safety is a right guaranteed to everyone who travels in, through, and around Cleveland? What if orange was rendered superfluous? A Color Removed addresses the underlying questions regarding the right to safety by encouraging community members to deconstruct its symbols and create solidarity for a more peaceful city. A Color Removed formally commenced with a public letter writing campaign in the fall of 2017 and continues with an open call for orange objects to be accumulated in collection bins installed throughout Cleveland. Clothing, toys, sports equipment, household items, etc. will be catalogued and displayed at SPACES from July 15 to September 30, 2018. The enlistment of community members in surrendering orange objects and developing responses to the supersaturated orange display at SPACES is an invitation to a difficult and ongoing conversation around the forces that shape safety in American cities, including gun violence and community-police relations, as well as the overlapping impacts connecting characteristics that are targeted for oppression. Facilitated discussions and workshops will be conducted by partner organizations, project collaborators, and neighbors, and housed within the monochrome A Color Removed display at SPACES, where fearless listening enables fearless speaking. A Color Removed was conceived by Michael Rakowitz, as a response to the shooting of Tamir Rice by Cleveland police, and was debuted as a call to action during his 2015 Beamer-Schneider Lecture at Case Western Reserve University. In response to community feedback and the involvement of the Rice family, the project evolved to include a group exhibition of newly commissioned works by Cleveland-based artists who have long explored the conceptual underpinnings of A Color Removed in their work: Amber N. Ford, Amanda King and Shooting Without Bullets youth photographers, M. Carmen Lane, and RA Washington of Guide to Kulchur Learn House. Additional collaborators include Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Amir Berbic, Christopher Horne, Elaine Hullihen, Kelley O'Brien & Anthony Warnick of The Muted Horn, and Samaria Rice & The Tamir Rice Foundation. The project is organized by SPACES and presented as part of FRONT International, An American City: 11 Cultural Exercises, taking place July 14 - September 30, 2018.

all images above are taken from this artnews coverage of the exhibition

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Colour belongs both to the arts and to the sciences, both to high culture and popular culture,  both to theory and to story telling. Within the arts vivid accounts of colour occur as much in literature as they do in the remarks of painters, sculptors and filmmakers. Colour has been addressed or ignored both by modernists and postmodernists; those who loathe colour have as much to say about it as those who love it. Colour is truly fluid: it spills over subjects and seeps between disciplines; and no one area can mop it up and claim a privileged or proprietorial relationship with the subject.

 from “Introduction//On Colour and Colours” by David Batchelor for the book “COLOUR” in the Documents of Contemporary Art series published by Whitechapel & The MIT Press