Here it is. Didn't edit it, but the Quicktime compressor fixed the syncing and so the timing is different. Have a good summer, all.

:D

Nikki's final piece

Hi Everyone,
Because of Nikki's flooded home, you all missed her final presentation.
Here are a few images of how her torn paper piece developed.
I wish you all a terrific summer. This has been a really great semester.
All the best!

Gone Bananas

As we've been talking about color and its relationship to time, we examined Stefan Sagmeister's installation of 7,200 bananas. I really enjoyed your reflections on this piece, especially Mary Ellen's astute comment that self-confidence does not always produce fine results. I wanted to post his statement about the piece that I found on another blog:



Because of the wonderful willingness of so many New York designers to write into our fogged up windows at Deitch (considering they all gave up 3 hours of their time I wanted to be there when they started) I spent quite a bit of time in the gallery and had a chance to observe many visitors. I had the impression that lots and lots of people were delighted by the banana wall, - during the 4 week run of the show hundreds and hundreds came through. Because so many visitors clearly enjoyed a banana with their eyes and with their nose, I was so surprised to learn you hated the smell. I myself absolutely loved it.

Why did I do this?
I wanted a formal device, that would allow the content of the sentence (“self-confidence produces fine results”) to appear and disappear, just like my own self-confidence comes and goes.

As a medium I chose bananas because their ripening process allows for this appearance/disappearence to happen, because they are an absolutely beautiful fruit, because they smell sweet and luscious as they turn brown, because they carry significant visual baggage (Andy Warhol’s banana cover for the Velvet Underground ever so slightly connected to our work for Lou Reed - who came by and loved the bananas by the way), because they fit neatly with our inflatable white monkeys, because glued to a wall bananas form a pattern reminiscent of a knitted sweater working tightly with our needle stitch typography.

Are these reasons good enough to “waste” almost $ 2000.00 dollars worth of bananas? I could have created the same size wall utilizing custom wallpaper, designed a vector graphic in illustrator, paid $ 8000.00 for printing it out and likely would have avoided upsetting anybody. I think it would have been weaker.

The bananas will come down on Sunday. If anybody from the blog wants to see them in real life, Saturday from 12:00 - 6:00 is the last chance. We’ll throw the brown bananas out. I donated double the cost of the bananas to the coalition for the homeless in New York.

— Stefan Sagmeister

Time-lapse videos

Ello.

Whenever I think of time related shtuff, time-lapse videos always come to mind. I'm hoping the following videos that I will link to will give you guys some inspiration and maybe even more ideas about your final pieces. If you have a really fast internet connection, watch the videos in HD by clicking on the HD button. The images come out cleaner and the colors can be viewed better that way.

The first video <--- click link and watch in HD

Eirik Solheim, the creator of this project, took images from the same spot outside his house over a year (2005) and then condensed them into a 40-second video that showcases the changes in color as the seasons change over time.



The second video is another time lapse video that Solheim did after completing the experiment he did in 2007. He added audio that he recorded on the spot to the video and since it is stretched to over 2 minutes long, the color changes are more subtle. Another difference that can be noted with this video from the first one is that the camera is more focused on the foliage and by doing this, the changes in colors are more arresting since the the areas where a lot of color changing that we attribute to seasonal changes (leaves :D) are right in the face of the viewer.


You can read more about his experiment at his website: eirikso.com
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The next video showcases various natural occurrences that are just simply mesmerizing. From wet brown sand, slowly being covered by a blanket of the light blue sea, the blue sea giving way to orange sand as the tide descends to night skies changing from purple-orange, to black with some reds peeking out from the sides as heavenly bodies streak into the horizon, their colors also changing... Fungi that people just tread on and ignore are pulsating and alive, slowly creeping onto moss-covered rocks while the mushrooms explode into intricate patterns, and as you zoom out into the sky, the blue atmosphere of dawn in the mountains is being tapped by the orange of the sunrise sneaking into view.

I can go on and on, but yeah, just watch it. In HD or you're missing out on really cool colors. :D



The last video is of city scenes and shows how light is interacting with the glass windows of tall buildings and how street lamps reflecting into the water and blurred car lights create stunning imagery in the urban landscape.


Enjoy :D

Violent color

Here's an article that I thought was a great example of writing about color; plus a link to some images from the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.


(c) 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Through April 19

New York -- The French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) combined the paint-handling of the Post-Impressionists with the high-keyed palette of the Nabis and the Fauves -- artists who concerned themselves with the poetic and expressive, rather than the naturalistic, functions of color. He atomized the world into a fever-pitch patchwork of color and light, creating paintings that are as mesmerizing as the most brilliant and beautiful sunsets. That beauty is in full force in "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors," a fierce tour de force at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Yet beauty takes many forms. And to be captivating, a painter must do more than razzle-dazzle us with pretty colors. Bonnard understood that, although paintings may provide us with images of the external world, they can also explore states of mind. Therefore, he pushed everything to the extreme. Bonnard's flowering trees can suggest divine revelation, and his domestic interiors are reminiscent of sacred visitations. But, also, his bowls of fruit can gape like wide-open craniums; cherries can glisten like viscera; and windows can suggest crucifixions. Bonnard's dining tables often resemble game boards, operating arenas, insurmountable cliff faces or expanses of desolate tundra, and his sunset-colors can become fiery rains, enveloping his figures like molten flame.

Alberto Giacometti said that he could not get over "the violence of Bonnard," a quality he found lacking in Jackson Pollock when he compared the two. And, certainly, "violence" gets at the heart of Bonnard's paintings and drawings. Seductive, mystical and lovingly brutal could also describe the intensity of Bonnard's gorgeously clashing hues -- iridescent lemons, limes, crimsons and violets that shimmer like precious metals and gems; blacks and whites taken to the extremes of the spectrum; and deep purples and blues, no less than reds, oranges and yellows, that burn every color of fire.

If you think you have seen Bonnard before, as in the Museum of Modern Art's 1998 retrospective, think again. "The Late Interiors," unlike MoMA's show, is installed more-or-less chronologically; and, also unlike MoMA's show, it includes an astounding room of drawings, gouaches and watercolors made from life. Many of these were the sources for Bonnard's larger paintings.

Bonnard's works on paper -- delicately twinkling, at times tiny, still lifes, interiors, windows and figures -- have a nervous energy and a bejeweled light. Some of these are as beguiling as Islamic miniatures, and together they sing in chorus. Bonnard, referring back to the drawings, painted from memory and imagination on numerous canvases at a time. Polishing, weaving, igniting and stirring his forms into being, Bonnard created psychedelic stews in which color is paradoxically translucent and opaque; and in which solids, seemingly materializing and dissolving simultaneously, feel sculpted out of viscous light.

The Met's exhibition of some 80 works that date from 1923 to 1947 was organized by Dita Amory, acting associate curator-in-charge of the Robert Lehman Collection, where the show, unfortunately, is installed. Is it specifically "late" or primarily of "interiors"? Not really. But who cares? The show, despite its circular, basement location, is a knockout. Yes, it includes the artist's magnificent interiors, especially luxuriant window views and sprawling, vertiginous tablescapes, which are the focus of this exhibit (absent, however, are the miraculous bathtub paintings so prevalent in MoMA's retrospective); but there are also masterly flower paintings and still lifes, as well as a grouping of the artist's ethereal self-portraits.

And, besides, although Bonnard worked in traditional genres, he never adhered to typical motifs. His interiors, otherworldly narratives, are erotically charged dramas and dreams. They are exalted states -- beautifully ambiguous collisions of genre, domesticity and fantasy. In the large painting "Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room)" (1930-31), the serene window view encroaches on the interior, exposing the table, its food and dishes in frigid, naked light. Here, as elsewhere in Bonnard's arenas, the miraculous butts heads with the commonplace.

Typical of Bonnard's mysterious creations is "The White Tablecloth" (1925), in which a standing woman sets or clears a dining room table while another woman, seated, looks directly at the viewer. This scene is fraught with an intentional range of metaphors involving transformation, ambiguity and instability. The interaction among forms is ritualistic -- holy in nature -- yet the scene retains its peculiar sense of homey clutter and normality.

The large tablecloth feels low to the floor, like a picnic blanket. It rotates and buckles in space, as if it refuses to stay put; and it glows yellow-white amid a room of dark, blood-red fire. As in many of Bonnard's interiors, the table appears to force the figures out of the picture. The standing woman, leaning on the table, is ballast and supplicant. She burns a red-hot orange, as if made of embers. And she dips her hand into the tablecloth, making offerings (gathering crumbs?), as if the table were some magical, snowy substance. Behind the seated woman, who looks as if she were carved of stone, is a long, peacock-feather-colored sideboard. The sideboard, standing vertically, seemingly rises out of her shoulders like angel's or butterfly's wings. Is this room heaven or hell; an Annunciation, a last supper, a sacrifice or just another family gathering? Bonnard won't say for certain.

In his wonderland, everything is exactly what it is -- fruit, window, woman, dog -- yet nothing is only what it appears to be. Working from his imagination and memory, Bonnard allowed transformations to triumph over fixed destinations. He allowed his bowls to become boats; his adults to transform into children or apparitions; his tables to become landscapes; his walls and fireplaces to become sunsets and windows -- and every window to open into another world.

Bonnard's paintings flit from one exalted state to another. Yet they never stray too far from the simplicity, comfortable chaos and familiarity of domesticity. Bonnard weaves memory into memory; fantasy into fantasy. He layers intensity upon intensity. Sometimes his paintings are like looking directly into the sun; other times they are like walking into a hothouse, a furnace or the rabbit hole of Bonnard's vivid imagination. Then again, as crazy as they are, Bonnard's interiors are just like coming home.

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Mr. Esplund writes about art for the Journal.

Credit: By Lance Esplund

Steven Alexander

Steven Alexander is an artist in Scranton PA - who does amazing things with color. His paintings usually consist of two contrapuntal bands of color. His palettes are varied. I find them to be lush, tempting to touch. Three examples from an exhibition in Houston are shown on the left. Many more of his paintings are on his website. Enjoy they are wonderful.


http://stevenalexanderstudio.blogspot.com/

Silence

Just as artists and thinkers have made strong connections between color and sound, many have also contemplated the connection between color and silence. As we've been doing silence experiments in class, we've also been playing with how to interpret silence visually. Thus far, the results have been varied and inspiring.

Other artists to look at on this theme include Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Vija Celmins, Diane Szczepaniak, Wolfgang Laib, James Turrell and Mary Temple. Rothko, Szczepaniak, and Laib create intensely vivid works, rich in color with a very silent presence. Martin works with very subtle palettes (which makes them somewhat challenging to grasp via a computer monitor) and Celmins's represenational achromatic drawings capture a breathtaking stillness.

It is also interesting to look at artists like Marina Abramovic and Kimsooja who have worked with silence in a performative way. Kimsooja's video A Laundry Woman documents her standing at the banks of the Yamuna river as flotsam from funeral pyres drift by. It is a complex and exquisite contemplation of our mortality.

mood and color

Here is an interactive color to mood website, short and sweet.  Explains some of the colors by mood, and interpretations of color.  www.weprintcolor.com/colourmoodtest.htm

Theresa

Color and Sound

“When I hear music, I see in the mind's eye colors which move with the music. This is not imagination, nor is it a psychic phenomenon. It is an inward reality."
Olivier Messiaen

“If, when a musical instrument sounds, someone would perceive the finest movements of the air, he certainly would see nothing but a painting with an extraordinary variety of colors.”

Athanasius Kircher
Musurgia Universalis (1650).

The Ancient Greeks drew a direct correlation between sound, color and astronomy in their search for cosmic harmony. Much later, 17th and 18th century scientists, mathematicians, and physicists were making similar connections. In Newton's Opticks (1704) he identifies a sound for each of the colors. The Jesuit monk and mathematician Louis Bertrand Castel in a somewhat quixotic manner came up with the idea for a clavecin ocular, or light organ in which the "correct" color would appear for each corresponding note. Artists have continued to examine the relationship between color and sound. Kandinsky, Klee, and Whistler actively examined this idea. Others including Bridget Riley in her Song of Orpheus series and Alma Thomas in her Red Rose Cantata and Cherry Blossom Symphony have also made direct relationships between color and sound. Architects like Chris Janney have worked extensively with color and sound in interactive environments and contemporary artist Stephen Vitiello, working with lighting designer Jeremy Choate come back to the ideas in the clavecin oculaire for their 2008 installation Four Color Sound.

What connections do you make between color and sound? How would you paint sounds? Or even more challenging, how would you paint silence?

Here are links to three great articles to help inform your creative process.

The Scale and the Spectrum, James Peel
published in Cabinet magazine, Issue 22, 2006

Color and Music, Jorg Jewanski
published in the Grove online Music Dictionary, 2006

The Sounding Image: About the relationship between art and music—an art-historical retrospective view, Barbara John

published on line at Media Art Net

Synesthesia and The Effect of Color on Taste Perception

"The word synesthesia, meaning "joined sensation", shares a root with anesthesia, meaning "no sensation." It denotes the rare capacity to hear colors, taste shapes, or experience other equally startling sensory blendings whose quality seems difficult for most of us to imagine. A synesthete might describe the color, shape, and flavor of someone's voice, or music whose sound looks like "shards of glass," a scintillation of jagged, colored triangles moving in the visual field. Or, seeing the color red, a synesthete might detect the "scent" of red as well. The experience is frequently projected outside the individual, rather than being an image in the mind's eye. I currently estimate that 1/25,000 individuals is born to a world where one sensation involuntarily conjures up others, sometimes all five clashing together (Cytowic, 1989, 1993). "

http://psyche.csse.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html

The particular synesthesia that deals with colors is the condition known as Grapheme-color snyesthesia where synesthetes report seeing numbers and letters having a particular color. An interesting quote from the Wikipedia article cites a writer and synesthete named Patricia Lynne Duffy discussing her synesthetic experience:

"'One day,' I said to my father, 'I realized that to make an 'R' all I had to do was first write a 'P' and then draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line.'"


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme-color_synesthesia

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The links that follow are about color in relation to food. The first article discusses how color affects one's appetite while the second link discusses how adding vibrantly colored food to one's diet can make a person healthier and even ward off cancer.















http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2008/02/05/is-visual-taste-perception-coloring-your-appetite/

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/07/29/color-guide-to-staying-healthy-and-eating-right/

:D

simultaneous contrast

In this section on chance and intention, we have begun looking at simultaneous contrast, noticing how relative color is. Many of us have had the experience of mixing what we thought was just the right color on the palette, only to seem terribly off on the canvas.  This mutability is an amazing phenomenon that was first discussed by the 19th century French chemist Michel Chevreul in his book The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and their Application to the Arts. Click on the link to read his text in GoogleBooks. The 20th century artist and color theorist Josef Albers did intensive research on this perceptual phenomenon.  Learn more about his work at the Albers Foundation website.  Another great website to visit is Marilyn Fenn's simultaneous contrast exercises. Test yourself!

Check out the Phillips Collection's current exhibit of Morandi paintings. He uses desaturated colors and monochromatic color schemes in interesting ways. Here are the web addresses for some images on their press site and their public website.

The exhibit is worth the trip downtown.

matisse, mondrian sale

Please see url below to see the article on Yves Saint Laurent art sale in Paris.  A Matisse sold for 41 million dollars and a Mondrian sold for 25 million.

http://news.aol.com/article/yves-saint-laurent-auction-matisse/353481

Theresa

Playing with Chance Image Gallery

If by chance...

After discussing some ideas about chance interactions in art, science, religion, and politics, we are now pursuing our own chance encounter by creating chance color wheels to develop chance color structures. What range of colors and combinations will be generated by our group? How will chance processes figure in to our work?




To read more on chance, check out the following articles:
Chance Imagery by fluxus artist George Brecht


Rolling the Dice: An Interview with Jackson Lears
by David Serlin; Cabinet Magazine, Issue 19 Fall 2005


To read more on John Cage, check some of these links.
A conversation with John Cage and Joan Retallack
pbs's page on John Cage
A collection of links to infomation on John Cage compiled by Josh Ronsen

To see more interviews and performances, YouTube has a good selection.

color matters

Hello everyone,

I found an interesting website called Color Matters.  www.colormatters.com

Check it out!

Theresa

Blue

When the Apollo astronauts made their voyages to the moon and took photographs like this - the blue marble, we earthlings began to think differently about our "home." As a sphere the Earth seems more fragile, more beautiful, more unique in the darkness of space. We also began to think globally -- to see the world as a whole. Well we're still working on that one....

Error Message - help

Help! I tried to access the indigo blue web-site and got the following error message: bX-palx5s. Did anyone have the same problem?

indigo blue

Check out Ann Hamilton's project Indigo Blue at the San Francisco MOMA's website to help you answer your homework questions.

kind of blue

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Here are some additional works by artists working with the color blue. What metaphors and symbolic associations do the works evoke for you?

subtractive primaries gallery

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In our last class, we examined several color systems and their primary colors. We're now doing in depth investigations into variations of temperature, saturation, and value for the subtractive primaries red, yellow, and blue. Here are works by some of the artists we looked at in class for inspiration.

Hey everybody,

I just wanted to help break the ice with an oil painting from James Jean; this painting is titled Catch/Batter. He is one of my favorite artist and in my opinion a master of color blending. This picture does not have a large distribution of color but somehow it still manages to be dynamic yet insipid. If anyone is interested in anymore of his work you can view it on the following website: http://jamesjean.com/

Welcome

Hi everyone!
Welcome to color theory. I'm looking forward to a great semester as we investigate color and the limits of our own perception. With this blog, we can share thoughts and ideas, upload interesting images and links to other great resources, as well as find out more about artists and ideas addressed in class. It will be a great study guide for the semester.

For this first posting, I will leave off with an excerpt from Anne Truitt's Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1974-79) :

"This winter is bringing me to a confrontation with the truth behind truths, like the color I know to lie just beyond color. I remember how startled I was when, early in 1962, I realized that I was becoming obsessed with color as having meaning...in itself, as holding meaning all on its own. As I worked...I slowly came to realize that what I was actually trying to do was to take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake...as if in some mysterious way I felt myself to be color..."