Читать книгу Color - Karen Speerstra - Страница 15

When I began writing this book, I realized my own feeble voice could never adequately portray the color-wisdom others have spent their entire lives researching and describing. So I decided to bring a few additional voices into our color dialogue and allow them to “speak” to various chapter topics as they wished. I’ve taken great liberties here, as there is nothing that exists exactly like this in their own real words. Instead, I looked at various things they had written or said and pretended they were speaking directly to us. Please forgive me if it’s not exactly the same way you might hear these folks speak. It’s what I “heard.” Each “Colorful Voice” begins with a short biography so you can more easily position them in time and place.

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JOHANNES ITTEN (1888–1967)

Itten was a Swiss expressionist painter, researcher, and color theorist who taught elementary school prior to 1916 before he was invited by Walter Gropius to teach a foundation course in craft through the study of color and form. At the Weimar Bauhaus Academy, he placed emphasis on spiritual openness and peace of mind, using gymnastics and meditation in his courses. He is said to be one of the first people to define and identify strategies for successful color combinations. Josef Albers was one of his students. Gropius’ direction for the school differed from Itten’s so Itten resigned in 1923 and opened a small art and architecture school in Berlin. The Nazis closed it down in 1933. All of Itten’s work explores the use and composition of color.

Color is life. A world without color appears to us as dead. Colors are forces, primordial ideas, the children of light. They seem to me to be radiant energies that can affect me positively or negatively whether I think about them or not. But if I’m not devoted to learning everything I can know about them, I won’t be able to unveil their deeper mysteries. If I don’t truly love them, they’ll hide.

When I think of color, the word that comes to mind is “quality.” Ever since I wrote The Art of Color in 1961 (and I understand students still find it useful — I am humbled) I’ve used four ways to investigate the quality of colors: hue, value, intensity, and temperature. Even when I know the “hue” or the name of a color — like red — that doesn’t tell me what kind of red. Does it smolder like an ember or blaze like the setting sun? Or look like an apple? So I add “value.” How does that red relate to black? To white? Or is it a middle value — somewhere in between? Then I look at “intensity.” How pure is that red? How saturated? And finally, there is “temperature.” I respond psychologically. Red is “hot.” Yellows through red-violets are warm. Yellow-green through green, blue, and violet are cool. Paintings with warmer colors “feel differently” than paintings where the cooler colors dominate.

I had my students collect newspapers, wire mesh, cardboard, wood, feathers, moss — whatever. And they created such colorful art.

Gropius thought I was too eccentric. I suppose my leaving the Bauhaus was mutual. I felt that he seemed more interested in the business of art and couldn’t see the validity of how true creativity stems from self-knowledge and wholeness, regardless of what compartmentalized technology and industry thinks. I left, clinging to my convictions. Many of the ways I look at things go way back as far as the Zoroastrians. I smile remembering how I’d shave my head and wear robes. I was a vegetarian all my life. More than anything, I wanted my students to understand that art and color and spiritual growth were all of a part, so I was happy when they caught on to breathing and meditation exercises. And before they could draw circles, I had them move their arms in wide circular motions. They needed to experience what they were to paint. When we analyzed powerful emotional paintings, such as Grünewald’s Crucifixion, I encouraged them to “become” Mary Magdalene. Many cried. And that was fine! Colors are emotions.

I was very fortunate to associate with great artists and architects teaching at the Bauhaus school. I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a grammar of color. Klee and Kandinsky were of great help in that regard, although Kandinsky saw no need for a theory of colors at all. He said all he wanted to do was render light simply as unfolding energy.

I’d often ask my students: “What happens when one color collides with another?” Some colors look cool and sophisticated with they’re alone, but when they’re combined… is the clash intentional? Maybe harmony isn’t what we once thought. Maybe it’s really more about equilibrium. I eventually came to understand, myself, that any color combination that doesn’t result in a neutral gray when combined, is disharmonious. Just as all colors appear within black, all colors warm to gray, and create a oneness, a lifelike harmony, within it.

I felt I was a successful teacher when my students began to understand that color is life.

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JOSEF ALBERS (1888–1976)

One of the most influential artist-educators of the twentieth century, Albers studied under Itten and taught handicrafts in the Weimar Bauhaus in Germany during the 1920s, founded by Walter Gropius. In 1933 he and his wife, Annie, a textile artist, came to the United States. He taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years before joining the Yale University faculty as chairman of the Department of Design. In 1971 Albers was the first living artist ever to be given a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Colors are like actors on a stage. They have faces. They breathe together. They interact. When I place gloomy raw sienna next to another color, it can turn to gold. A weak color is made rich and beautiful by working alongside its neighbor.

I have eighty different kinds of yellow and forty grays and I nest squares of pure unmixed color next to others and I sit back to watch how they behave.

When I began my endless “Homage to the Square” — when was it? 1950? — I was using optical illusions and free-floating squares to talk about relationship. Old Wilhelm von Bezold taught me a lot. I remember he said, “Colors hold moral correlations.” It sounds like he got that from Goethe. Red, yellow, and blue are cheerful; black, green, and white, more serious.

My students have always been wonderful people who didn’t need “right” answers as much as the “right” questions. It was my old friend Kandinsky who used to say, “It’s never about the what but always about the how.” Teaching is never a matter of method, but always of the heart. So we collect paint chips and colored paper or leaves and “paint” with them. If we’re lucky, we can see the “how.”

I’m amused by people who want to put my work into a neat little box. They use words like abstract expressionism. Geometric abstraction. The constructivist movement. Why do they do that? There really are no divisions to art. Fine arts. Functional arts. Crafts. It’s all one. It’s like music. It’s the harmony that’s important, not the titles. And like music, it’s not the individual tones that make it — it’s how they’re put together. Individual letters don’t make poetry, after all.

I remember some of John Ruskin’s words that hold a special place in my heart. “Hundreds of people can talk, for one who can think. But thousands of people can think for one who can see.”

Ah, yes. And seeing with emotional freedom. That is what every artist craves. Indeed, every person! I know that’s what I’ve been looking for my whole life.

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FABER BIRREN (1900–1988)

Faber Birren graduated from the Chicago Art Academy and spent much of his career in American industry as a color researcher and consultant. He devoted thirty years of his life to researching and creating color standards linked to our perception of and response to color. Besides numerous articles, he authored twenty-five books and deserves the title of foremost color authority of our time. The Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color was his gift to Yale University and is considered the foremost collection of works on color.

How can I talk about color? Even my favorite — maroon. Especially when I think, like the old Zoroastrians, that light comes from a great god — more spiritual than physical. It’s almost too big to even discuss.

Nevertheless, I have. And I usually have to begin with Aristotle and sift out from his hundreds of books what he said in De Coloribus. He thought all colors came from black and white. And they were connected with air and fire. When black hits sunlight or firelight, it always turns crimson, he thought. But a vivid bright violet is obtained from a blend of feeble sunlight with a thin dusky white. He called color a drug, and when he looked into the sun, he saw a flight of colors. I try it, without blinding myself. I close my eyes. After a bit, I see an afterimage of crimson, purple, then black and then… nothing. Just like Aristotle. I’ve read that when Goethe tried it, he saw an afterimage of yellow, then purple, then blue.

I learned a lot from Chevreul, the famous French chemist. He continued his work until he was well over a hundred, working primarily with tapestries and carpets. He named colors primaries, secondaries, and intermediate hues — we still use those words. He gave me the idea that complements enhance and offer each other more brilliance than they’d have alone. I suppose it’s rather like people.

I take pleasure in thinking back and remembering how I’ve helped people work with less fatigue in more enjoyable colors in their workplaces. Color can even reduce accidents. The military still uses my color codes.

I came up with a triangle that anybody can draw. It helps me understand all aspects of color in a simple scheme. In the middle of the triangle I write “Tone.” On the three triangle points I add the words: “Color,” “White,” and “Black.” Between “Color” and “White” I add “Tint.” Between “White” and “Black” I put “Gray.” And between “Black” and “Color” I write “Shade.” There it is: all colors in a triangular nutshell.

People used to gaze at a rainbow, convinced it held the secrets of the universe in its colors. Now we use a spectroscope. Science has taken the universe down to the most infinitesimal details. But the exact nature of light and color is still an enigma. I continue to live with its mystery.

¹ Theo Gimbel, Healing Through Colour (London: The C.F. Daniel Company, Limited, 1980), 64.

² Snorri Sturlson, The Prose Edda (The American-Scandinavian Foundation, London: Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press, 1916), 17.

³ Howard Schwartz, “On the First Day,” Parabola Vol. 26, No. 2, May 2001, 16.

⁴ Quoted in The Rainbow Book edited by F. Lanier Graham (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 103.

⁵ Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (New York, Penguin Books, 1987), 72.

⁶ David Adams Leeming, Creation Myths of the World: an encyclopedia, Volume 1, Second edition (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2010), 184.

⁷ From the Kojiki, the “Record of Ancient Things,” Japan’s oldest chronicle compiled 500-700 CE by O. No Ysumaro.

⁸ Kiara Windrider, Year Zero (Studio City, CA: Divine Arts/Michael Wiese Productions, 2011), 100.

⁹ Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Santa Fe. NM: Bear & Company, 1983), 175.

¹⁰ W. Y. Evas-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1977).

¹¹ St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul (New York: Image Books, Doubleday, 1959), 163.

¹² Ibid., 192.

¹³ Edwin D. Babbitt, The Principles of Light and Color (Babbitt and Co., 1878, University Books, edited and annotated by Faber Birren, 1967), Preface, xviii.

¹⁴ Helen Keller, Don’t Miss the Miracle, a poem written by Keller from her essay, “If I Had Three Days to See,” (Atlantic Monthly, January, 1933.)

¹⁵ Matthew 6:22-23.

¹⁶ The Book of Common Prayer… according to the use of The Episcopal Church (Kingsport, TN: Kingsport Press, 1977), 112.

¹⁷ Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Doubleday, 1995).

¹⁸ Philip Callahan, Ancient Mysteries, Modern Visions: The Magnetic Life of Agriculture (Austin, TX: Acres U.S.A., 2001).

¹⁹ Normandi Ellis, Dreams of Isis (Wheaton, IL: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1995), 21.

²⁰ Jane Roberts, The World View of Paul Cézannne (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 215.

²¹ Benjamin Franklin, (from a letter Franklin sent to Cadwallader Colden April 23, 1752. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin Vol. 4, New Haven, 1961), 299.

²² Wayne Muller, How, Then, Shall We Live? (New York: Bantam Books, 1996), 56.

²³ Andrew Harvey, The Hope (Carlsbad, California: Hay House, Inc., 2009), 39.

²⁴ Hildegard of Bingen, Scrivas (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), Preface.

²⁵ Ibid., 3, 1.

²⁶ Helen Greaves, Testimony of Light (London: Neville Spearman, Ltd, 1977), 124, 125.

²⁷ Ibid., 83.

²⁸ Chandogya Upanishad, 3.13.7

²⁹ John O’Donohue, Beauty, The Invisible Miracle (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 82.

³⁰ Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined Story of Light and Mind (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 269.

³¹ Ian McEwan, Solar (New York: Random House, 2010), 154.

³² Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions and the Future of the Cosmos, (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 248.

³³ Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), 35.

³⁴ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 14-15.