“The knowledge gained from books or from their teachers, as stated in the Vedas, is comparable to traveling in a wagon. ... But the cart serves you only as long as you drive along a large, beaten track. As soon as it ends, you are forced to leave it and go on foot. ”
In this book, I want to try to create a similar “carriage” that could help anyone interested in the problems of artistic color. You can, of course, travel without a cart and go off-road, but in this case, the movement is slow and full of danger. Those who wish to achieve a distant and lofty goal would be wise to first acquire means of transportation in order to move confidently and quickly.
Many of my students helped me to build such a "wagon", and I am deeply grateful to them all.
The system outlined in this book is an aesthetic doctrine of color, arising from the experience of observing an artist-painter. For an artist, the effect of color is decisive than its reality, which is studied by physicists or chemists. The action of color passes through the eyes. However, I firmly believe that the deepest and most authentic secrets of color influence are not visible even by the eye and are perceived only by the heart. The main thing escapes in the abstract, abstract formulation.
Are there any general color rules and laws in visual arts and aesthetics, or is aesthetic color assessment determined only by subjective opinion? My students often asked me this question and every time my answer sounded like this: “If you, not knowing the laws of owning color, are able to create coloristic masterpieces, then your path lies in this“ ignorance ”. But if you are unable to create masterpieces in your "ignorance", then you should take care to obtain the relevant knowledge. "
Laws and theories are good in situations of uncertainty. In moments of inspiration, tasks are resolved intuitively, by themselves.
A thorough study of the great artists who masterfully mastered color led me to the firm conviction that they were all familiar with the science of color. The color theories of Goethe, Runge, Bezold, Chevrel and Helzel were of great importance to me.
I hope that in this book I will be able to clarify a number of color problems. And not only to set forth the basic laws and rules of its objective nature, but also to more accurately determine the area of subjective limits in the sense of taste color evaluation. If we want to get rid of subjective dependence, then this is possible only by the knowledge of the objective fundamental laws of color.
In music, composition theory was for a long time an important and widely accepted part of vocational education. However, a composer may have a counterpoint and still be a bad composer if he has no intuition and no inspiration. The same happens with the painter; he may know all the possibilities of composition in the field of form and color, but remain fruitless if he is deprived of the same qualities. Goethe said that genius is 99% of sweat and only 1% of inspiration. JS Bach - the same. At one time in the press there was a discussion between Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner on the relationship between inspiration and counterpoint logic in the work of the composer. Strauss claimed that in his works only 4-6 cycles were dictated by intue, while the rest were the result of contrapuntal design. To which Pfitzner remarked: "It is quite possible that Strauss created his first 4-6 bars in exactly this way, but with Mozart, many pages in a row were often dictated only by a spiritual impulse."
Leonardo, Durer, Grunewald, El Greco, and other painters without prejudice were concerned with the study of the means of artistic expression. How could the Isenheim altar be created if it were not to reflect on its shape and color?
Delacroix in the book “Artists of my time” wrote: “Neither analysis nor the study of color theory in art schools in France is even provided for, since attitudes toward these problems are predetermined by the saying: you can learn to draw, but a painter must be born ... Secrets of color theory? Why call secrets the laws that should be known to every artist and that we should all be trained in? ”
Knowledge of the laws in force in art should not be held down, and rather, on the contrary, can help to get rid of uncertainty and hesitation. Of course, given the complexity and irrational nature of the manifestations of color, everything that we currently call its laws can be quite fragmentary knowledge.
Over the centuries, the human mind has penetrated many secrets, their essence, their mechanism. These include rainbows, lightning, the laws of aggression, and much more. Although for all of us all these phenomena continue to retain their mystery.
Just as a turtle, during a danger, puts its paws under its shell, so the artist, working intuitively, sets aside his scientific knowledge. But would a tortoise live better if it had no paws?
Color is life, and a world without colors seems dead to us. Colors are the original concepts, children of primordial colorless light and its opposite - colorless darkness. As flame produces light, light produces color. Color is a child of light, and light is his mother. Light, as the first step in the creation of the world, reveals to us through the color of his living soul.
Nothing could hit the human mind as much as the appearance of a giant crown of color in the sky. Thunder and lightning scare us, but the colors of the rainbow and the northern lights soothe and elevate us. Rainbow is considered a symbol of peace.
The word and its sound, the form and its color are the carriers of the transcendental essence, only still dimly visible to us. Just as the sound gives its word its shine, so the color gives the form a special spirituality.
The original essence of color is a fabulous sound, music, born of light. But as soon as I begin to think about color and try to touch it, forming certain concepts, its charm is destroyed, and only our body remains in our hands.
According to the color of the monuments of past eras, we could determine the emotional character of the disappeared peoples. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks experienced great joy from the many-colored forms.
In China already in ancient times there were many excellent painters. In the 80s BC, one of the emperors of the Han dynasty arranged whole warehouses-museums of paintings collected by him, bowing before their beauty and beauty. In the era of the Tang (618-907) wall painting and painting on wood, characterized by a special brightness, appeared in China. At the same time, new yellow, red, green and blue glazes for ceramics were discovered. In the Sung era (960-1279), the sense of color became extremely subtle. Color in painting has acquired a variety of different shades and with its help sought to achieve naturalism. In ceramics, they used a variety of colored glazes of previously unknown beauty, such as beauty of the color of sea water or moonlight.
In Europe, preserved brightly colored polychrome Roman and Byzantine mosaics of the first millennium of the Christian era. Mosaic art is based on a special relationship to the possibilities of color, because each color region consists of a set of point particles, and the color of each of them requires careful selection. Ravenna artists of the 5th-6th centuries were able to create a variety of effects using complementary colors. So, the mausoleum of Galla Placidia is shrouded in an amazing atmosphere of gray. This impression is achieved due to the fact that the blue mosaic walls of the interior are illuminated with orange light coming from the narrow alabaster windows painted in this color. Orange and blue are complementary colors, which are mixed in gray. The visitor to the tomb all the time under the influence of various streams of light, which alternately highlight the blue, then orange, especially since the walls reflect it from a continuously changing angle. And it is this game that creates the impression of a soaring gray.
In the miniatures of the Irish monks of the VI11-IX centuries, we find a very diverse and sophisticated color palette. Those pages on which different colors have the same lightness are striking in their brightness. The picturesque effects of a combination of cold and warm colors achieved here are not found until the impressionists and Van Gogh. Some sheets from the “Book of Kells” on the logic of their color scheme and the organic rhythm of the lines are magnificent and pure, like Bach's fugues. The sophistication and exquisite intelligence of these "abstract" miniaturists received its monumental continuation in the stained glass windows of the Middle Ages. The fact that initially only a small number of colors were used in the manufacture of colored glass (because of this, it made a somewhat primitive impression) is explained by the capabilities of the glassmaking technique of that time. But even so, anyone who has ever seen the windows of Chartres Cathedral with varying lighting, especially when a large round window flashes when the sun sets, turning into a magnificent final chord, he will never forget the divine beauty of this moment.
The artists of the Romanesque and Early Gothic epochs used the symbolic language of color in their wall paintings and easel paintings. To this end, they sought to apply certain, uncomplicated colors, achieving a simple and clear symbolic understanding of color and not being carried away by the search for numerous shades and color variations. The same task was subject to form.
Giotto and the artists of the Siena school were the first to try to individualize the human figure in shape and color, thereby initiating a movement that led to the emergence of many bright individuals in Europe in the 15th and 17th centuries. In the first half of the 15th century, brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyckie began to create paintings, the composite basis of which was determined by the actual colors of the depicted people and objects. Through fading and clarity, lightening and darkness of these colors, the sound of the picture more and more approached the realistically similar. Color became a means of conveying the naturalness of things. In 1432, the Ghent altar appeared, and in 1434 Jan van Eyck created the first portrait in the Gothic era - a double portrait of the Arnolfini couple.
Piero della Francesca (1410-1492) wrote people, sharply outlining the figures with distinct expressive colors, using additional colors that provided picturesque balance to the paintings. Rare colors themselves were characteristic of the frescoes by Piero della Francesca.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) refused to be brightly colorful. He built his paintings on infinitely thin tonal transitions. His "St. Jerome" and "The Adoration of the Magi" are entirely written only in sepia tones from light to dark.
Titian (1477-1576) in his early works had homogeneous color planes in isolation from one another. Later he began to strive for picturesque modulations of cold and warm, faded and saturated. The best example of such modulations is, perhaps, “La Bella” in the Palatina Gallery in Florence. The color characteristic of his later paintings was formed by him, based on various light and dark shades of the primary color. And as an example of such an approach is the painting “The Crowning with Thorns”, located in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.
El Greco (1545-1614) was a student of Titian. He transferred his principles of multi-tone study of the picture to the huge expressive canvases of his painting. El Greco's peculiar, often stunning color coloring ceased to be the actual color of objects and turned into an abstract, expressive-psychological means for expressing the theme of the work. That is why El Greco is considered the father of non-objective painting. Color, organizing a purely picturesque polyphony of paintings, lost for him the value of the subject category.
A century earlier, Grünewald (1475-1528) solved the same problems. While El Greco always, and in a manner peculiar only to him, linked chromatic colors to black and gray, Grunewald contrasted one color to another. From the so-called objectively existing color substance, he was able to find his own color for each motive of the picture. Isenheim Altar in all its parts demonstrates such a variety of color characteristics, color effects and color expression, which rightly allows us to speak of it as a universal intellectual color composition. “Annunciation,” “Choir of Angels,” “Crucifixion,” and “Resurrection,” are paintings that are completely different from one another in both drawing and color. For the sake of artistic truth, Grünewald even sacrificed the decorative unity of the altar. To remain truthful and objective, he placed himself above the rules of scholasticism. In his art, the psychologically expressive power of color, its symbolic-spiritual essence and the possibility of transmitting realistic truthfulness, that is, color in all its three components of influence, were fused together in the name of the semantic depth of the work.
Rembrandt (1606-1669) is considered to be the painter of light and shade. Although Leonardo, Titian, and El Greco used the contrasts of light and shade as expressive means, this was completely different for Rembrandt. He sensed color as dense matter. Using the transparent shades of gray and blue or yellow and red, he created the picturesque matter of the deepest impact force, matter that lives its own amazingly spiritual life. Using a mixture of tempera and oil paints, he sought a texture that produced an unusually suggestive effect. With Rembrandt, color becomes materialized light energy, full of tension, and pure color glows like the way precious stones sparkle from the darkness of their frames.
El Greco and Rembrandt introduce us to the very center of baroque color problems. In the extremely intense composition of the baroque architecture, the space is built rhythmically and dynamically. This trend is subject to color. It loses its objective significance and becomes an abstract means of color rhythmization of space and is ultimately used for the illusory deepening of space. The works of the Viennese artist Maulberg (1724-1796) clearly demonstrate the baroque principles of working with color.
In the painting of the era of the Empire and classicism, color solutions were essentially limited to the use of black, white and gray colors, which were moderately animated by several chromatic colors. Realistic, similarly restrained painting of these styles was supplanted by romanticism. The beginning of the romantic trend in painting is identified with the works of English painters, with the names of Turner (1775-1851) and Constable (1776-1837). In Germany, the largest representatives of romanticism were Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and Philip Otto Runge (1777-1810). The artists of this trend used color primarily as a means of emotional impact, able to convey the "mood" of the landscape. In Constable's paintings, for example, there is no uniform green color, since he created it from the smallest gradual transitions from light to dark, from cold to warm, from faded to pure. As a result, the color surfaces gave the impression of being alive and mysterious. Turner created several non-objective color compositions that allow him to be considered the first “abstract artist” among European artists.
Delacroix (1798–1863), while in London, saw the works of Constable and Turner, whose color scheme impressed him so deeply that when he returned to Paris, he rewrote some of his works in the same spirit, and it caused a sensation in the Paris Salon of 1820 of the year. Delacroix was actively involved in all his life with the problems of color and his laws.
It can be firmly said that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, color, its action and essence began to arouse general interest. In 1810, Philip Otto Runge published his theory of color, using a color ball as the coordinating system. In the same year, 1810, Goethe’s main work on color was printed, and in 1816 Schopenhauer's treatise, Vision and Color, appeared. Chemist and director of the Paris tapestry factory M. Chevrel (1786-1889) published in 1839 his work “On the law of simultaneous contrast of colors and on the choice of colored objects”. This work served as the scientific basis for impressionistic and neo-impressionistic painting.
Through a deep study of the nature of the Impressionists came to a completely new system of color transfer. The study of sunlight, changing the natural colors of objects, as well as light in the atmosphere of natural surroundings, has enriched impressionist artists with new scientific knowledge. Monet (1840-1926) so conscientiously studied these phenomena that he had to change the canvas every hour in order to fix the changing color reflexes of the landscape and truly convey the movement of the sun and the corresponding changes in sunlight and its reflections. The most complete picture of this method is given by its “Councils”, located in Paris.
Neoimpressionists broke color surfaces into separate color points. They argued that every pigment blend destroys the power of color. Points of pure color should be mixed only in the eyes of the viewer. Chevrel's book "The Science of Color" provided them with invaluable help in thinking about the decomposition of color.
Отталкиваясь от достижений импрессионизма, Сезанн (1839-1906) логически пришел к своей новой системе цветового построения картин. Он хотел сделать из импрессионизма нечто «солидное», что должно было составить основу цветовых и формальных закономерностей его картин. Рассчитывая прийти к новым ритмическим и формальным построениям, Сезанн применил разработанный пуантилистами метод разделения для цветовой модуляции всей поверхности картин. Под модуляцией цвета он понимал его переходы от холодного к теплому, от светлого к темному или от тусклого (глухого) к светящемуся. Подчиняя этому принципу решение всей плоскости картины, он достигал их нового звучания, впечатляющего своей жизненностью.
Titian and Rembrandt resorted to color modulations only when depicting faces and human figures. Cezanne, on the other hand, worked through the whole picture in its formal, rhythmic and chromatic unity. In his still life "Apples and Oranges" this new unity is extremely obvious. Cezanne sought to recreate nature at a higher level. For this, he primarily used the effects of exposure to contrasts of cold and warm colors, giving a feeling of light airiness. Cezanne, and behind him Bonnard painted pictures, completely built on the contrasts of cold and warm.
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) rejected color modulations and turned to impressively simple and bright color planes, placing them in a subjectively felt sense of balance with respect to each other. Together with Braque, Derain, Vlaminck, he belonged to the Paris group Wild.
Cubists Picasso, Braque and Gris used color to identify light and shadow. First of all, they were interested in the form, transforming objects into abstract geometric shapes and achieving the impression of their volume with the help of tonal gradations.
The expressionists Munch, Kirchner, Haeckel, Nolde and the artists of the Blue Rider group (Kandinsky, Mark, Macke, Klee) again tried to return the painting to its psychological and spiritual content. The purpose of their creativity was the desire to express their inner spiritual experience in color and form.
Kandinsky began to paint pointless paintings around 1908. He argued that each color has its inherent spiritual and expressive value, which allows you to transfer higher emotional experiences, without resorting to the image of real objects.
In Stuttgart around Adolf Helzel formed a whole group of young artists who attended his lectures on the theory of color, based on the discoveries of Goethe, Schopenhauer and Bezold.
Between 1912 and 1917, artists worked in different parts of Europe completely independently of each other, whose works could be united by the general concept of “concrete art”. Among them were Kupka, Delone, Malevich, Itten, Arp, Mondrian and Vantongerlo. In their paintings, pointless, for the most part geometric shapes and pure spectral colors appeared as real objects. Intellectually perceived form and color became the means of creating a clear order in pictorial constructions.
Somewhat later, Mondrian took a further step forward. He, like Giri, used pure yellow, red and blue as the constructive material of the paintings, where shape and color created the effect of static equilibrium. He did not strive for either hidden expressiveness or intellectual symbolism, but for real, optically discernible, specific harmonic constructions.
Surrealists Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and others used color as a means for the painterly realization of their “unreal images”.
As for the tashists, they were “lawless” both from the point of view of color and form.
The development of color chemistry, fashion and color photography has aroused a general interest in color, and the sense of color in many people has become significantly thinner. However, modern interest in color is almost entirely visual and material in nature and ignores sense and spiritual experiences. This is a superficial, external game with metaphysical forces. The color, the power radiated by him, energy, acts on us positively or negatively regardless of whether we are aware of it or not. The old masters who created the stained-glass windows used color to create an unearthly, mystical atmosphere and prayer meditations that carried them into the world of spiritual reality. Color, indeed, must be experienced not only visually, but psychologically and symbolically.
The nature of color can be studied from different perspectives.
Physicists investigate the energy of electromagnetic oscillations or the essence of light particles that carry light; the possibility of a color phenomenon, in particular, the decomposition of white color with its prismatic dispersion; case color problems. They study the mixing of colored light, the spectra of various elements, the frequency of oscillations and the length of various color waves. Color measurement and classification also belong to the field of physical research.
Chemists study the molecular constitution of colored materials or pigments, the problems of their strength and fading, solvents, binders and the manufacture of synthetic dyes. Currently, the chemistry of paints covers an extremely wide range of industrial research and production.
Physiologists study various actions of light and colors on our visual apparatus — the eyes and the brain, their anatomical connections and functions. At the same time, the study of the issues of adapting vision to light and darkness, chromatic vision takes a very important place. In addition, the phenomenon of residual images also applies to the field of physiology.
Psychologists are interested in the problems of the influence of color radiation on our psyche and state of mind. The symbolism of color, its subjective perception and different attitudes towards it are important, key themes of psychologists, as well as the expressive color effect, designated by Goethe as its sensory-moral manifestation.
Painters who would like to comprehend the aesthetic side of the effects of color should also have knowledge of the physiology and psychology of color. However, in art there is also a purely field of color knowledge. The relations between color reality and color influence, between what is perceived by the eye and what appears in the human mind, are most important for creating an artistic image. Optical, emotional and spiritual manifestations of color in the art of painting are interrelated.
The effects of the various effects of color and the ability to control them should be the basis of the aesthetic theory of color. At the same time, the problems of subjective perception of color turn out to be especially important in artistic education, art history, architecture, and for artists working in the field of advertising and fashion.
The aesthetic aspects of the impact of color can be studied in three ways:
It is interesting to note that in pre-Columbian Peru, in Tiahuanaco-style, the color was symbolic, in Paracas-style it was expressive, and in Chimu-style it was inherently impressive.
Studying the culture of ancient peoples, we find styles in which color was used only as a symbol for designating belonging to different social strata or castes or as a symbolic sign to express mythological or religious ideas.
In China, yellow — the lightest color — was intended for the emperor, the Son of Heaven. No one else dared to wear yellow clothes. Yellow color was a symbol of higher wisdom and enlightenment. If the Chinese wore white clothes on the occasion of mourning, it meant that they accompanied the sky leaving the kingdom of purity and purity. White was not an expression of personal sadness, he was worn, as if helping the deceased to reach the supreme kingdom.
If at the time of pre-Columbian Mexico the artist used a figure dressed in red clothes in his compositions, everyone understood that this is about the god of the earth, Xype-totek, and thus about the eastern sky in its meaning of sunrise, birth, youth and spring. In other words, the figure had a red color not for reasons of visual aesthetics or tasks of special expressiveness - the color was symbolic here, like a logogram, signs or letters replacing words in shorthand, or hieroglyph.
In the Catholic Church, the spiritual hierarchy was expressed in the color symbolism of clothes: purple for the cardinal and white for the popes. For each church holiday, clergymen were to be clothed in the clothes of prescribed colors. It goes without saying that true religious art refers to color symbolically.
When it comes to studying the emotional and expressive effects of color, we turn to our great masters, El Greco and Grünewald.
The optical-optical side of color exposure was the starting point and the basis for the pictorial works of Velázquez, Zurbaran, Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, the Dutch masters of still life and interior, also the Lenen brothers, and later Chardin, Ingres, Courbet, Leible and other artists. "Solid" Label especially diligently and intently observed the most subtle transitions of color in nature and just as subtly transferred them on his canvases. He never worked on his paintings if there was no live model in front of him. Such artists as E. Manet, C. Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley, usually called Impressionists, studied the actual color of objects in its dependence on sunlight. So in the end, these painters increasingly began to deviate from local colors and turn their attention to color fluctuations caused by changes in light at different hours of the day.
Only to those who love color, its beauty and inner essence is revealed. Everyone can use the color, but only he selflessly loyal to him, he allows to comprehend their secrets.
If, in order to study color, one has to speak separately about each of the three aspects of its impact: constructive, expressive and impressive, then I would not like to miss the opportunity to say that each of these aspects presupposes the presence in color and the other two. Thus, symbolism without visual accuracy and without psychological and emotional power will most likely be anemic, intellectual formalism. Sensual and impressive action of color without its spiritual and symbolic truth and psychological expressiveness will lead to a banal imitating naturalism, and psychologically expressive action without constructive symbolic and optically sensual content will turn out to be limited sentimental dullness. It goes without saying that each artist will work according to his temperament and will place particular emphasis on one or the other of these aspects.
In order to avoid confusion with further acquaintance with the book, I would like to give a more precise definition of the concept of "color character" and "color tone". Speaking about the nature of any color, I mean its position or place in the color wheel, or in the color ball. Both pure primary colors and all their mixtures have a distinct character. So, for example, green can be mixed with yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, white and black, and in each case it acquires a specific, one-of-a-kind character. Each color change as a result of simultaneous influences also creates a new, special character.
When we want to determine the degree of lightness or darkness of any color, we are talking about its tonal quality. The color tone can be changed in two ways: either by combining this color with white, black or gray, or by mixing with two colors of different lightness.
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