Rebel artists obsessed with colour

Post Impressionism

For more than a hundred years, it has been the accepted right of artists to assert their personal judgement in their choice and application of colour in their art making. Before the rise of symbolism 1880s, artists had to conform to accepted conventions and rules, in particular about the colouring of objects (normal colouring) and accepted codes of colour symbolism.

Post Impressionism is an artistic style that followed Impressionism at the end of the 1800s. Impressionist artists were very interested in capturing an immediate impression of what the eye sees in a single glance. They were interested in things like how light falls on subjects, and how it appeared in different weather and different times of the day etc, an interest traced back to realism. They liked to work outdoors in natural light rather than in a studio. They did not follow traditional rules of composition, and favoured more subject matter that appeared informal and spontaneous. They liked their art to reflect what they saw around them…rural scenes, city life, people just living their life. The style was very sketchy, quick with visible brushstokes. Their art tends to have brilliant colours that almost shimmer in their intensity. Some important impressionists of note are Monet, Manet and Renoir.

Most post impressionists began as impressionists but then began to try new ideas. Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van gogh are among my favourites. Their work leaned towards a more spiritual and expressive approach. They wanted to add emotion and symbolic meaning to their art, and achieved it through using bold, unrealistic colours and very expressive brushstrokes. Post impressionism influenced later styles of Fauvism, Cubism and abstract art.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Van Gogh is one of the worlds most famous artists. Although he only became famous after his death in 1890. In his lifetime he only sold one painting! He was born and raised in Holland, and spent most of his adult life in France. He has a very unique ‘Post impressionist syle’. His paintings are very expressive. He uses colour in a very intense and symbolic way that creates a lot of surface tension and movement in his paintings through use of colour combinations, esp complementary colours.He was also influenced by japenese prints, creating thick black lines in his work and filling it with colour. Van Gogh made a significant contibution to the art world through his use of colour - he set about using colours to convey mood and emotion, rather than using colours realisticially.
"Instead of trying to exactly what i see before me, I make more arbitrary use of colour to express myself more forcefully" (image - The sower, 1888)

I went to visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam a few weekends ago. Its really amazing. It gives a good overview of his life, and the progress of his work. It was cool to see the paintings in real life, after having read so much about them in text books. Ive always loved them, we have a few of his prints hanging on the wall at home..'the sower' and 'langlois bridge at Arles with women'. Van Gogh’s paintings really fuel my interest in colour. I just think they are so beautiful. Im really fascinated by his use of colour to create movement in his paintings. I am quite interested in the concept of 'movement' and exploring movement in colour could be a way to develop this. Among my favourites of his work is Starry nights, Weatfield under Clouded weather, Cafe at Arles, his iris and sunflower studies, and many of his 'field paintings', in particular 'the sower'.'The Sower' is a good example of using complementary colours eg Purple and Blues against Oranges and Yellows to create movement and distance within the field.

Paul Gauguin( 1848-1903)
Paul Gauguin was another leading Painter in the Post impressionist period. He was born in france and initially worked for the Paris Stock Exchange before beginning to paint in 1833. By this time he was about 30yrs old. Gauguin was heavily influenced by the Impressionists, inparticular Pissaro and Cezzane, but later he broke away and developed his own bold style. Gauguin, Like Van Gogh was also interested in the emotive qualities of colour and sought to break away from its conventional use. In a famous lesson he gave to Paul Serusier, he told him to forget the conventional use of colour he was being taught at his academy and to paint the colours he saw in front of him, using brilliant colours.
"“How do you see that tree? It’s green? Well then, make it green, the best green on your palette. How do you see those trees? They are yellow. Well then, put down yellow. And that shade is rather blue. So render it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermillion.”
His style was somewhat similar to Van Gogh as well, through his use of outlines filled with intense opaque colour. He applied his paint in a flat, even way, which different from the textured brushwork of earlier impressionists. (image - Breton Girls dancing, Pont-Aven, 1888)

I havent seen much of Gauguins work before, but from what ive seen of it so far I really love it. Im going to France at the end of my stay,so hopefully i can find some Art galleries with his work in it. Im really fascinated by his use of really bright, intense colour used in non conventional ways but the colours still hold much emotive content. For example. in the 'Breton girls dancing' you are empowered by a bright yellow field of grass. Well everyone knows that grass isnt bright yellow..its usually a dull green..but from the use of bright yellow you get the feeling that its a really bright sunny, happy day. And even though its bright yellow you still know its grass cos it resembles grass in figure more than colour.I like that. Associative but non conventional. Nice.

Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism arose in America following the World War II. It held sway until the dawn of Pop Art in the 60s. Abstract Expressionism is rooted in other movements such as Post Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism that promoted Abstraction rather than realism. Some famous Abstract Expressionists are Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. These artists were part of what is known as the 'New York School'. It was through Abstract Expressionism that New York replaced Paris as the centre of the Art World. The Abstract Expressionists' goal was a raw and impulsive art. What mattered were the qualities of the paint itself and the act of painting. In its purest form in western art, abstract art is non figurative with no recognisable subjects. Abstract expressions are more interested in the colour and use of line and texture and the form and materials and support of a painting..these are the 'subject matter' of abstract art. Its completely non objective or non-representational. A further distinction tends to be made between more geometric abstract art, such as Mondrian, and art that is more fluid such as Kandinsky.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

Kandinsky is a famous Russian artist, considered to be the great inventor and theorist of Abstract art in the 20th century. His early work was inspired by impressionism - expressive yet figural, reminiscent of matisse. His later work moved in a direction that was of greater abstraction than most Impressionists. He began exploring his own ideas of painting and continously develop his own distinct personal style. Figural elements were reduced until the finally disappeared. Kandinsky titled his works impressions, compositions or improvisations. He was heavily influenced by relationships between art and music and the emotional power of music. Kandinsky formed the 'Blue Rider', a group of artists that believed in a birth of a new spiritual epoch. For Kandinski, art was a portrayal of spiritual values:

"All art builds from the spiritual and intellectual life of the twentieth century. While each art form appears to be different externally, their internal properties serve the same inner purpose, of moving and redefining the human soul'

This belief in the secret correspondance of all the arts became the cornerstone of all his artistic convictions and a foundation for his painting. He believed that all the arts were in a state of spiritual renewal and were beginning to come closer to their objective by turning to the abstract, the elemental. Every art form would have to devote itself to an examination of its individual elements. Kandinsky was interested in geometrical elements - frequently using the straight line, the angle, curves, the half circle and the circle. Kandinsky also focused on the phsycological qualities of colour. He formulated a new harmonic theory of colours that maintain their tension by contrasts:

The warmth is a tendency to yellow, the coldness a tendency to blue. The yellow and the blue form the first big contrast, which is dynamic. The yellow possesses an eccentric movement and the blue a concentric movement, a yellow surface seems to get closer to us, while a blue surface seems to move away. The yellow is the typically terrestrial color whose violence can be painful and aggressive. The blue is the typically celestial color which evokes a deep calm. The mixing of blue with yellow gives the total immobility and the calm, the green.

Clarity is a tendency to the white and obscurity a tendency to the black. The white and the black form the second big contrast, which is static. The white acts like a deep and absolute silence full of possibilities. The black is a nothingness without possibility, it is an eternal silence without hope, it corresponds to death. That’s why any other color resonates so strongly on its neighbors. The mixing of white with black leads to gray, which possesses no active force and whose affective tonality is near that of green. The gray corresponds to immobility without hope; it tends to despair when it becomes dark and regains little hope when it lightens.

The red is a warmth color, very living, lively and agitated, it possesses an immense force, it is a movement in oneself. Mixed with black, it leads to brown which is a hard color. Mixed with yellow, it gains in warmth and gives the orange which possesses an irradiating movement on the surroundings. Mixed with blue, it moves away from man to give the purple, which is cooled red. The red and the green form the third big contrast, the orange and the purple the fourth one.

Kandinskys latest work underwent huge transformation. He broke away from the constructivist colour theories based on primary and secondary colours and began using combinations of colours never seen before in the art world. The colours were applied thinly, sometimes transparently, and sometimes textured by the addition of sand. Kandinsky also dissolved basic geometric forms into a variety of shapes inspired by sources like invertebrate sea creatures, microorganisms and zoological prototypes. These paintings are considered 'hotheaded,seething,primaeval, as if some distant sun were trying to set life flowing again with protoplasm in a pond'. (Images - 1:'Arab Town', 1908, 2:'Yellow, red, blue', 1925, 3:'Colourful Ensemble', 1938)

Wow, it took me a while to get my head around Kandinskys art. But it is actually very interesting. I love his work for his emphasis on the symbolism and pshycological qualities of forms and colours. Ive displayed these three works because i think they are a good example of how his work progressed. Im really impressed with his earlier, impressionist like work. I love it because its figurative and mostly of the landscape, or travels as such. I love 'Arab town' because it is so simple in form...outlines and colour.Although the colours are pretty conventional in this one, i think there is more of his later work that experiments a bit more with non conventional colours. Im really interested in Kandinskys exploration of colour theory and psychology, he discovered alot by playing around with colour temperatures..finding that some recede and others jump out at you..some are cooler and warmer....you can see the evidence of this theory in the painting 'yellow,red, blue' - the cool blue obviously recedes while the yellow jumps out through the foreground.This is general of todays colour theory. Looking at his work satisfies my interest in the idea of contrasts/binaries/opposites..whatever you may like to call them.Im not so interested in the shapes as much as i am the use of colour. His later work i think is very beautiful and very daring. The use of colour is very experimental. But i think that im still mostly drawn towards that of the earlier figurative works.

Piet Mondrian(1872-1944)

Piet Mondian is a very famous Dutch painter and an important contributor to the De Stijl movement (known as neo-platicism). De Stijl (The style) was an artistic movement in the 1920s that advocated pure abstraction. It was founded by Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. It sought to express an ideal of spiritual and universal harmony and order by eliminating all representation. Through radical simplification of composition and colour they sought to expose the basic principles that underlie everything in reality.The movement influenced art forms like painting and sculpture and also architecture and interior design. Mondrians goal was to eliminate all traces of representation in favour of basic form and colour. He simplified composition to only vertical and horizontal lines to show that the canvas was a place consisting of right angles. He reduced his colour palette to that of only flat primary colours and black and white.

(image - composition with Red, Yellow and Blue, 1937-1942)

Hmmm. Im not too sure how to comment on Mondrians work, because to tell the truth im not quite sure i understand it completely and not too sure that i like it that much. Aesthetically, the images are really pleasing and they satisfy me through their simplicity and their emphasis on the aesthetics..form..colour..line..But lack of texture. But thats about it, it does not speak to me about anything deep imediately...only if i really think about it. I think im mostly interested in him because hes a dutch artist..and i appear to be very interested in dutch artists while im in Holland. I havent seen any of his work here yet. But at the Utrecht central museum i did see work of Gerrit Rietfeld, who was also part of the De Stijl movement. Apparently there is a 'Mondrian house' here in Utrecht as well, so maybe it would be a good idea to go visit it and see his work in real life. What inspires me the most about Mondrians work is his use of a reduced colour palette through out his work. I too am quite interested in exploring a limited colour palette. I experimented with this a little in first year with the colour blue. Id be quite interested in forming my own colour palette and researching the symbolic and psychological qualities of the colours, but using them alongside figurative content to get a particular emotion or feeling across.

Mark Rotkho(1903-1970)

Rothko was a leading figure in the Abstract expressionist movement. He is well known for his 'signature style' of large abstract paintings in which large, rectangular, soft edged forms hover above a stained background. Though Rothko was highly interested in colour, he did not like to be called a 'colourist'. He was not so interested in abstraction and the relationships between form and colour, but more interested in the use of colour to portray emotions such as ecstacy, tragedy and doom, and what the artist described as a 'religious experience'. Rothko was influenced by surrealist ideas, which saw artistic creativity as a key to unlocking the concious. He was interested in ancient myths and symbols and was affected by Carl Jungs theory that proposed 'all human beings, regardless of geographic origin or time period, shared a common mental organization , which manifests itself in folk tales, myths and symbols'. Rothko saw his paintings were a way of communicating a shared repertory of images that are reflective of this collective unconcious.

I think that Rothkos work is absolutely amazing and i prefer it to the work of Mondrian and most of Kandinsky's work. Maybe it is Rothkos pure interest in colour and its emotive quality...no mucking round with lines and other shapes..so all you have is colour to affect your emotion, and what you get out of the paintings. All you see is soft rectangles of colour, no harsh lines or anything. And the compositions are HUGE..you have no choice but to let them overpower you. One of my favourites is 'white and greens in blue '...there are other really cool ones, but i just seem to have an obsession with the colour blue. Rothko was interested in surrealism, as am I. Im interested in the whole idea of dreaming, and how dreamlike, surreal images sometimes seem more real than "reality". I have been thinking alot about "dreams" lately, not just the ones you get in your sleep...but ones that you have for your life..like ones that can actually be achieved.

Post Impressionism or Abstract expressionism?

Hmmm. Well from my research i have an answer. Im so much more inspired by Post impressionism than I am Abstract expressionism. I think because it fits in the middle of my interest in colour, and my interest in "figurative" or "realist art". I think that realist artists are very very talented. But if they want to capture reality to the exact detail...why not just take a photograph? they would save ALOT of time! And i like abstract art because its cool to look at...but yet it misses the figurative element which i like. And so Post impressionism seems to combine my two interests. It allows the figurative...people, landscapes, still life..whatever...but there is the freedom to alter it through the use of non conventional colour..to change a particular feeling or emotion towards what is going on in the image or "subject matter". Doing this research was interesting, and i think its good because it helps me to work out what sort of images that i am interested in, and want to produce.