The Language of Color

How do artists use color to create meaning?

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What are the artists reasons for choosing colors?

• Artists use color to create the time of day or give a sense of place or atmosphere to their work

• Artists use color to express emotion• Artists use color to achieve an emotional

response in the viewer• Artists use color as a technical element of

design• Artists use color to support a story

Time of dayWinslow Homer uses a primary color palette and white to capture the strong daylight of the tropics

Homer uses a limited dark palette to create the illusion of a night scene

Night

Even though Van Gogh is using saturated warm and cool colors, the context of the bright yellows surrounded by blues and greens gives them a cooler appearance and supports the feeling of a night sky

Cool Color• Cool colors all

contain blue, they tend to recede from the viewer and create a sense of distance

• Cool colors are also thought to be refreshing and clean.

Cold Color & Emotional DistanceIn this painting of the Old

Guitar Player, Pablo Picasso uses only cool blues + brown to reinforce the sadness, distance and isolation of the musician. Picasso did several melancholy paintings during his “Blue Period”

Warm Color

Warm Colors all contain red.

Artists can use these colors to create a physical response to temperature.

VanGogh uses them to express the heat of a summer day

Hot Color

Mark Rothko uses the strength of saturated red to compress the smaller orange shape. Saturated hot colors like these advance towards the viewer.

Light

John Singer Sargent creates a sense of light on the water by using hues that are transparent and light in their value ranges. This allows the blue and orange complments to create a sense of acivity without clashing

Dark Values

Leonardo da Vinci said “Color is the enemy of art”.

Artists from earlier times used value rather than color as their most important tool.

Colors containing black are used to create volume and shadows.

Supper at Emmaus

Caravaggio captures a serious moment using dark colors contrasted with smaller areas of red and white. The white and red also lead the eye through the painting

Drama

3 centuries Later, John Singer Sargent uses a similar palette in this portrait of the actress Ellen Terry in the role of Lady Macbeth to heighten the sense of drama.

Neutrals vs. Dark values + Red

Winslow Homer isolates the two figures in the painting “Lifeline” with gray and neutral colors to focus the viewer’s attention on the figures at the center of the story

Arbitrary colorTwo impressionists, Van Gogh and Gaugin did not

reproduce exact realistic color in their work. This freed artists to pursue color as a separate compositional

element

Bright colors are active

Keith Haring used these high key complimentary colors to help create a feeling of movement

Bright

Piet Mondrian uses lines of bright color on a white background to replicate the rhythm and activity of New York City streets

IcarusHenri Matisse uses

these bright primary colors in an active dancing way. This work tells the story Icarus who fell to earth after flying too close to the sun

Color and MediumDale Chiluly uses the

transparent and reflective properties of blown glass.

The complimentary color scheme and saturated colors create lively movement to the inside and outside of the piece

Pale

Artist Mary Cassatt worked in pale hues. The pale colors, all made with white help us to connect with the idealized and romantic vision of mother and Child

How does a change in intensity of the colors affect the way you react to the content?

Vote

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Same subject, no color

Consider Dorothea Lange’s Mother & Children, the achromatic scheme creates a documentary style and a very different response to the situation of the subjects.

Do we react to color in the same way?

Choose a group of adjectives that best describes this painting

A Cheerful, happy, joyous, bright, merry playful, sprightly

B Dreamy, sentimental, serene, soothing, tranquil, mysterious

C Dark, depressing, sad, gloomy mouful, serious, solemn, tragic

D Dramatic, emphatic, majestic, triumphant

E Agitated, exciting, impetuous, reckless, feverish

F Frustrated, explosive, angry, restricted

The Blue House-Marc Chagall

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Can color alone create feelings?Look at these 2 paintings by Mark Rothko and answer the poll

question on the next slide

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“He who wants to become master of color must see, feel, and experience each individual

color in its many endless combinations with all other

colors.”- Johannes Itten