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.