Friday, September 18, 2015

Color Theory In Modern Art

Colour Belief in Contemporary Craft


Around 1810, writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe enhanced Newton's theories by studying the perceptual effects of color. He divided colors into the "plus side" and the "minus side." "Plus" colors, such as red and orange, generated feelings of warmth while "minus" color, such as blue and green, generated feelings of coldness.

Early Application

Artists quickly adopted Newton's color wheel as a guide for their own art making.



While our dope of colour has been evolving in that out of date times, scientist Sir Isaac Newton laid the foundation for recent colour judgment when he developed the colour circle in the 1660s. Newton understood that disparate mixtures of flashing imaginary colour visible to the human eye. The three colours that could not be fictional by mixing--red, treacherous, and blue--became celebrated as substantial colours. Newton drew a Hand-bill diagram, instantly called the color wheel, to showed how influential colors mix to create secondary colors and how secondary colors mix to create tertiary colors.


Colour judgment has obsessed artists perspicacity into their Art for centuries. During the Renaissance and throughout 17th and 18th century, the fundamentals of colour judgment helped artists skilfully render the visible apple. Nevertheless, as the Period of Voguish Craft emerged, artists began to employment colour impression to diverge from concrete and experiment with visual insight.

History



Prominent 18th-century painters like Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Antoine Watteau, who mainly depicted epic historical scenes or regal portraiture, used color theory to render skin, cloth and nature as convincingly as possible. In the 19th century, when Romanticism emerged, artists became more interested in color's emotional impact. By the time Modernism arrived at the turn of the 20th century, color theory in art had become less a tool for accuracy and more a vehicle for innovation.


Advancements


As artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee began using color to symbolize feelings and movements rather than reality, a new approach to color theory emerged. Swiss theorist Johann Itten explored "successive contrast," a phenomenon in which our brains create complimentary afterimages of the colors we observe. For example, someone who looked at red would have a green afterimage.


By showing that people instinctively respond to color harmony and discord, Itten suggested that color can create dynamic perceptual experiences even if it isn't used to symbolize anything.


Modern Application


Modern artists became notorious for using color as the subject of their paintings. Kandinsky painted colorful circular patterns while Josef Albers painted squares of colors inside of each other in order to explore how we perceive light and hues. When Color Field painting became popular, artists like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko would fill large canvasses with single colors.


Significance


The Modern approach to color theory emphasizes the complexity of our perception of light. Modern artists' work suggested that color could affect both mood and behavior. This laid the foundation for postmodern and contemporary artists who would continue the exploration, using neon, LED screens, film and other media to further experiment with perception.