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Crossing eight time zones overnight rendered them
off kilter, with scrambled brains. Physically, they
are a baker’s dozen of jet lagged, drained
shells; strangers to each other, in a strange land.
Each has come to Paris to take an art class: Color
Theory and Practice. Each will stand in front of
paintings in the Louvre and Musee d’Orsay,
and come to, hopefully, understand how artists,
past and present, deal with issues of color.
Pea green metal chairs decorated by pigeons with
random white splotches line the flinty, dusty pathways
of the Luxembourg Gardens. Nearby are bee hives.
I mention the hives as a landmark, not to give expectations
of an impending sting. If you know the park, this
will give you your bearings. It is a quiet part
of the park, except for the sound of the bees, the
occasional click of steel boule balls striking each
other on the other side of the bushes, the traffic
beyond the chestnut trees; or a pea green chair
being dragged into the shade. Listen as the hollow
metal legs of thirteen rusty chairs vibrate over
the chips and pebbles of flint as the students drag
them into a lopsided circle. The sound resonates
somewhere between amplified bee buzzing, a sort
of non verbal rocky stuttering, and a slow motion
collision between two bicycles. One by one the sleep
deprived students select their pigeon poop spattered,
unoccupied, metal chairs scattered along the edges
of lawns and flower beds. Each drags a poop caked
chair to a wide, shady, spot on another path. At
least one student expressed the hope that the vibration,
generated by dragging, would pop the dried poop
off. Many chairs being dragged at once is a noisy
and dusty event.
Because anti -Jet Lag measures had been largely
ignored by the students, they were exhausted. My
first goal was to make them comfortable in Paris,
introduce them to each other and help them stay
awake. Once the dust died down, I addressed the
students: “Answer me these questions
three: What is your name?” “What is
your quest? “What is your favorite color?”
Every college student knows “Monty Python
and the Holy Grail”, and recognizes these
“questions three”. The bridge keeper’s
questions work as a tool to introduce them to each
other, while the colors double as mnemonic device
for remembering names. Other purposes are served
by the color answer. The questions are non invasive
and no matter how jet lagged, you can’t get
them wrong. In the movie, Brave Sir Robin incorrectly
answers the color question and is thrown into the
abyss. How could anyone possibly get the question
wrong? That’s the point of the humor. He couldn’t
name his favorite color? Ha ha. The most disoriented
student can see the pressure is off.
The color question also gathers data for an informal
color preference survey. One point addressed in
the course, is the piddling vocabulary used to communicate
color designations, while another is the surprisingly
universal human preference for particular colors.
Ask anyone on the entire planet what his or her
favorite color is and nearly 20% of the population
will say blue, bleu, blau, blu, azul, or the local
word that means the same color. The meager range
of words used to describe colors has one benefit,
it makes data gathering quite simple; at least when
you are polling color preferences.
Thanks to our generic tags for colors, which ignore
or fail to define by assigning names to distinctions
within a hue; most people if asked to name their
favorite color, especially if they are caught off
guard, will say one of the following: blue, red,
green, black, purple, brown, pink, white, gray,
yellow, mauve, fuchsia, and maroon. 1001 American
adults sampled on behalf of Russian born artists,
Komar and Melamid, in their well documented 1994
“What’s your favorite color” responded
with those color choices in that particular order.
Yes, thirteen words uttered. The human eye can distinguish
thousands upon thousands of colors, one from another.
Interestingly, we name colors in the broadest of
terms, defined by where they sit in the spectrum:
primary colors, secondary colors, black and white
and spare odds and ends.
While some range to the numbers of color signifiers
differ from one culture to another, none has too
wide a range of designations in common usage. Any
culture claiming otherwise is as mythical as the
assertion that Eskimos have “hundreds of words”
for ice and snow.
The students offered their names, their reasons
for coming to Paris, and indicated their color preferences:
there was a red, followed by a blue, then came a
green, another green, a yellow, etc. Uninfluenced
color choices were emerging from jet lagged brains
and crawling out through lips. I tallied each answer
in my notebook.
Like a predictable event, color choices were building
toward validation of Komar and Melamid’s results,
until one of the four art studio majors in the group
answered: “cerulean”. Curious choice,
cerulean. Cerulean is a very specific pigment within
the blue range, it covers those pigments that resemble
sky blue. Was this art major trying to show off
or impress me; doing what she could to avoid naming
a generic color? I marked down blue, asking her
if it was ok. She said, cerulean was cerulean, not
blue. Hmm... I wasn’t about to quibble with
a jet lagged student who didn’t want cerulean
to be blue. Puzzled by her stance, I inverted my
pencil and erased the tally from under blue and
made a sub category for cerulean.
When expressing color preference your actual reference
may be as specific as the color of your favorite
pair of socks, but unless the socks can be shown
to the person you are communicating with, you are
handicapped into linking an adjective to a color
name. Such as muddy red. What is muddy red? Seriously,
attempting to communicate a particular red within
the red family is difficult unless accepted landmarks
can be referenced, like Dorothy’s ruby red
slippers or a Coca Cola logo. Color is influenced
by light, as the Impressionists demonstrated, so
a term such as green grass is conceptual at best.
Is the grass Kentucky blue grass, red fescue, in
shade, in bright sun, in a ballpark under artificial
light?
How about ice cream? Baskin - Robbins offers 28
flavors, many depending upon flavor juxtapositions
and catchy names, but all fall within a thin range
of pastel tints. Ah, but we are in Paris and Bertillon,
France’s non-franchised crown jewel of frozen
dessert, is two Metro stops away.
Bertillon can beat Baskin-Robbins both in variety
of flavors and colors. Cassis, black currant, is
my favorite flavor. I cannot properly describe the
taste, but the depth of the color is roughly equivalent
to the splendorous red of Dorothy’s slipper
in the shade of an ancient chestnut tree, only deeper,
richer. Flavors and colors are intense at Bertillon,
worthy of being on anyone’s favorite color
or food list.
The introduction session was over. I encouraged
the students remember each others color preferences.
I would certainly remember the color choice of one
student in particular. Off we went for two scoops
at Bertillon.
The next morning we visited the Louvre to look
at paintings for their use of color. Before we started
I asked them to close their eyes and imagine a painting
they might find in the Louvre, other than the “Mona
Lisa”. Then I asked them to make a thumbnail
sketch and assign colors that might be used. Sounds
quite unfair, doesn’t it? It is not a test,
just a record of their preconceptions. I knew they
would imagine dark, near colorless portraits; or
paintings with the Holy family; again dark and dark
and dark. The students had recently taken an Impressionism
course, so I was confident about their preconceptions.
Then, to break down those misconceptions, I gave
them a little tour. I showed them the grand Italian
gallery filled with Mannerist canvasses, where flowing
draperies were an excuse to enjoy the optical pleasure
of color; and the smaller humidity controlled space
containing glowing panels painted in Siena, where
the ethereal is made real and the colors are as
fresh today as when they were laid down. The freshness
of color in the panel paintings is a result of painting
with pure, unmixed pigments. The values one sees
in these works are a result of the underpainting,
not of mixing white or black with color.
Splitting the students into groups, I asked them
to survey particular galleries for percentages of
colors used by the artists. They would examine five
paintings and roughly estimate what percentages
of red, yellow, blue, green, purple, orange, white,
and black were used; compiling a composite pie chart
of pigment distribution for the artworks. I demonstrated
using the painting in front of us as a model. I
pointed out that while I might have asked for them
to break the paintings into red, yellow, blue, black,
and white; they should count orange, purple, and
green. If they saw a gray they were to interpret
it as a percentage of white to a percentage of black,
possibly with whatever additional colors in the
mix.
After they compare survey results, I would lead
them to view Gericault’s “Raft of the
Medusa”, and tell them about bitumen, the
black pigment that devoured colored pigments, continuing
to spread and engulf colored pigment particles long
after the painting was complete, leaving paintings
looking like studies in black. Bitumen seemed a
promising polychrome pigment at the time it was
first used. It mixed well with reds, blues, and
other colors, giving a warm depth to the image.
Mixing black with color had become common painting
practice. This painting method saved the painter
a lot of time, by eliminating the need to do underpainting
of lights and darks. The problem, unknown at the
time, was that while pigments are generally minute
rock-like particles of color; bitumen was a more
fluid coal derived substance. As the oil medium
dried the black continued to move freely, further
cloaking the colors than the artist might have wanted.
Those galleries I sent them to survey contained
paintings based upon the mixing of black with colors.
Tomorrow we would visit the Impressionists at the
Muse d’Orsay. To jump ahead for your benefit,
the survey today, contrasted to that tomorrow, reveals
that while the relative use of percentages of pigment
colors remain constant, the amount of black and
white change roles. Tomorrow they will slap themselves
in the face when they see how fear of black leads
to something unexpected. Now, for the results of
the color comparisons.
Each of the four groups reported the names of the
artists, time span, and broke down the percentages
of colors they saw.
Somehow I unwittingly manage to allow chaos to
creep into every color question I have thought I
had the answer for. My suspicions grew when I saw
group three’s eyes dart back and forth during
group two’s presentation. Before group two
could complete, group three interrupted.
“Um, why didn’t the first two groups
include BROWN?” Chaos strikes again! Brown?
Brown? What is brown?
Draw a color wheel. Divide it into primary; red,
yellow, and blue; and secondary; orange, green,
and purple; colors. You have a pie with six slices.
Each slice represents a portion of the pie, but
also a segment of the visible color families we
call hues. Let’s fill in each slice of the
pie so it is very faintly seen at the pointy end
of the slice, make the color more intense as you
approach the rounded end. This describes saturation
of color, also known as degree of intensity. From
the same intensity red hue, a pink and a maroon
might be created, the mitigating factor being the
addition of white or black. In color mixing, white
tints a color while black shades it, but the entire
black to white scale describes value. Most colors
can be located at an address provided by hue, intensity,
and value. Pink, lavender, baby blue, and mint green
are common names for tints of red, violet, blue,
and green. Do we have common names for tints of
yellow and orange? On the shaded end we know maroon,
navy, and forest. So, where is the slice of the
spectral pie that belongs to brown? Just follow
the orange wedge until it almost turns black. Brown
is essentially dark orange.
I followed the progress of my “cerulean”
student throughout the year and attended her degree
exhibition. In the street, on a clear cloudless
day in May when all colors become bright and unmuddied
by black, I spied her walking in my direction. From
the distance I saw she was smiling, pleased to be
finished with school. She was wearing a handsome
celadon color sweater. Celadon is a pale gray-green
color inspired by Chinese porcelain glaze. Her celadon
sweater played off her long dark reddish orange
hair to make a stunning simultaneous contrast. “So,
how did you like the show?”, she wanted to
know. I responded that I liked the work a lot, but
had a question? I spent more than an hour looking
carefully at her work, but failed to find a single
smear of blue, let alone cerulean.
Not a speck of cerulean. So, what had happened
to her favorite color? Why hadn’t she used
it? She said she had used her favorite color. But
I saw no cerulean? I reminded her she said that
cerulean was her favorite color. “Oh, I was
jet lagged that day. I really meant to say celadon.”
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