Chromaticism

“ Indeed, Nature, who would seem to be the source of our notions of color harmony, rarely repeats herself, yet is endlessly balancing inequalities of hue, value, and chroma by compensations of quantity. ”

“ It was thought best to limit the subject of proportionate distribution to small areas, where the designer is often forced to make decisions and to divide surfaces into proportionate color parts for his surface enrichment.
We may now repeat the definition of harmony with the accentuation placed upon a certain wording directly applicable to small surfaces. Harmony is obtained by the proper balancing and proportionate distribution of value, hue, and chroma upon a surface to give a unified and pleasing reaction to the eye and intellect. ”

“ In Greek music χρωματικὴ μουσική was one of three divisions—diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic—of the tetrachord. Like the Latin color, χρῶμα was often used of ornaments and embellishments, and particularly of the modification of the three genera of the tetrachord. The chromatic, being subject to three such modifications, was regarded as particularly “coloured.” To the Greeks chromatic music was sweet and plaintive. From a supposed resemblance to the notes of the chromatic tetrachord, the term is applied to a succession of notes outside the diatonic scale, and marked by accidentals. ”

“ Chroma is the strength of a color. It is the quality by which we distinguish a strong color from a weak one. The standard hue is approximately full chromatic intensity. Likewise each tint and shade is considered to be of its full chromatic intensity, making the left-hand boundary of the rectangle the area of full chroma. ”

“ The sense in which the ancient Greeks viewed harmony is as follows:—“They by that term understood the succession of simple sounds according to their scale, with respect to acuteness or gravity.” Whilst it appears that by harmony, the moderns understand—“The succession of simple sounds, according to the laws of counterpoints.” From the same authority—“By melody, the ancients understood the succession of simple sounds, according to the laws of rhythm and metre, or in other words, according to time, measure, or cadence. ”

“ Side by side with the evolution of letters and calligraphic art went on the evolution of the graphic power and the artistic sense, developing on the one hand towards close imitation of nature and dramatic incident, and on the other towards imaginative beauty, and systematic, organic ornament, more or less built upon a geometric basis, but ultimately bursting into a free foliation and flamboyant blossom, akin in inventive richness and variety to a growth of nature herself. ”

“ While much early ornament, as we have seen, is traceable to a constructive origin, another kind, or another branch of the tree of design is traceable to a symbolic origin, and springs from the endeavour to express thought—to find a succinct language in which to express some sense of the great powers of nature, and their influence upon the daily life of man—to embody even in a pictorial emblem, symbol, or allegory his primitive conceptions of the order of the universe itself. ”

“ Sometimes one gets, in writing, a piece of horizontal structure, a firm and majestic melody, with but little harmony. Such are the great spare, strong stories of the old world. Modern writing tends to lay much more emphasis upon depth of colour, and the danger there is that such writing may become a mere structureless modulation, The perfect combination is to get firm structure, sparingly and economically enriched by colour, but colour always subordinated to structure. ”

“ A style of composition was aimed at, more purely ideal, less connected with nature, than is to be found in the remains of the ancient, or in the works of the early modern masters. Genius hovered on the very confines of credibility and of the impossible, deriving the elements of its creations from imaginings awful and imposing, embodied in forms of gloomy sublimity and power, overwhelming—not awakening—to the human sympathies. As characteristics of this imaginative style, the proportions are enlarged, the expressions forced, and action and energy are given, destructive of grace and reality. ”

“ A certain artistic use can be made of them, and indeed we find that every new wave of artistic expression is preluded by a breakdown of the abstract combinations of symbols in which the symbols had become most completely devitalized, and a return to a sense of a meaning, a colour, a life in the symbol itself. This results in simplification, which ultimately gives place to a new complication. What is called progress in art consists mainly of this process. ”

“ Whether we are discussing music, poetry, painting, sculpture or architecture, we are forced to speak as though certain physical objects—vibrations of strings and of columns of air, marks printed on paper, canvasses and pigments, masses of marble, fabrics of freestone, are what we are talking about. ”

“ The first manifestation of art occurs through attempts to reproduce objects. Such attempts have been found which date back to prehistoric times. But what is primitive man’s idea in such attempts? He wants to record by a line the contour of the object, the likeness of which he wishes to preserve. ”

“ And the entirely new, musical understanding they have of colour acts in such a way that their creation transcends the narrow limits of the symbols it represents and assumes the lofty, revealing faculty of an infinite harmony. ”

“ For all we mould in clay or cast in bronze or carve in stone or tint with encaustic pigments or colour with paint, in a word, every attempt at artistic representation by the hand of man after a brief lapse of time loses its truth and becomes motionless and impassive like the face of a corpse. So far superior to all pictorial art in respect of truthful representation is the craftsmanship of the smooth mirror and the splendour of its art. ”

“ If colour and form produced by a study of harmony and a limited appeal to nature could be united to elaboration and minuteness of finish, with symmetrical arrangements freed from purely mechanical detail of ornament ”

“ In its very simplest form we have merely bands of color, or geometrical patterns made of squares, triangles, or hexagons. Here the artist has the maximum amount of freedom in the choice of color, the surfaces over which it is spread being of the same form and size, and hence of the same degree of importance. In such cases the chromatic composition depends entirely on the taste and fancy of the decorator, who is much less restricted in his selection than with surfaces which from the start are unequal in size, and hence vary in importance. ”

“ There is a great gain of Harmony. There is a Harmony of Intervals and a Harmony in the repetition of the same grouping of outlines. In the outlines themselves we have a Harmony of curved character, and the curves fit one another very well, owing to a correspondence of measure and shape-character in certain parts. In such cases we are able to get considerable Harmony of Attitudes into the composition. There is a Harmony of Attitudes in the repeats, as well as in certain details. Comparing Fig. ”

“ If you’re going to make a supposition, you’ll have to keep it clean, and think in terms of something that really might not have happened. For example, music. There are lots of peoples, right here, who never found the full chromatic scale, including the classical civilizations. ”

“ We say advisedly “ornamental device in books,” for infinite almost are the applications of Symbol and Emblem to Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, as is testified by the Remains of Antiquity in all parts of the world, by the Pagan tombs and Christian catacombs of ancient Rome, by nearly every temple and church and stately building in the empires of the earth, and especially in those wonderful creations of human skill in which form and colour bring forth to sight nearly every thought and fancy of our souls. ”

“ We shall see hereafter that, in making chromatic compositions for decorative purposes or for paintings, artists of all times have necessarily been controlled to a considerable extent by the laws of contrast, which they have instinctively obeyed, just as children in walking and leaping obey the law of gravitation, though hardly conscious of its existence. ”

“ And this may seem strange, when we consider that antique art was itself due to perfect comprehension of nature. But the contradiction is easily explained. The study of nature, as it was carried on in the Renaissance, comprised the study of effects which had remained unnoticed by Antiquity; and the study of the statue, --colourless, without light, shade, or perspective, hampered, and was hampered by, the study of colour, of light and shade, of perspective, and of all that a generation of painters would seek to learn from nature. ”

“ In the investigation of this point it will be necessary to consider the processes by which an art inherits or acquires the forms of another art or of nature, and how one material imposes its peculiarities upon another material. In early stages of culture the processes of art are closely akin to those of nature, the human agent hardly ranking as more than [Pg 446] a part of the environment. The primitive artist does not proceed by methods identical with our own. ”

“ By far the greater portion of workers in the field of Greek sculpture are concerned at the present time with the morphology of art for the sake of its history. The analysis of forms is utilized to ascertain an historical series, to discover schools, to establish dates. Here we find scarcely a mention of schools or artists, no reference to history and not a date. The analysis of form leads to the interpretation of monuments and the establishment of ideals. It is the physiology, not the history of art. ”

“ Varied tonal and harmonic colour, and structural freedom: those are the two battle-cries of the young generation. Little by little the old tonalities, based as they were on fixed centres, are slipping away; all the notes of the chromatic scale are acquiring even status; the principles of structure are newborn with every new work. ”

“ They are abstract, and often almost symbolic in their characterization of form, and it is not difficult to imagine how letters and written language became naturally evolved through a system of hieroglyphics, starting from the unsystemized but irrepressible tendency of the human to record his linear ideas of rhythm on the one hand, or his impressions of nature on the other. ”

“ The eye grows accustomed to it, takes delight in it, and expects its recurrence. It becomes established by use and wont, and is often associated with fundamental ideas of life and the universe itself. Thus we get traditional ornament, handed on from generation to generation, its origin and meaning perhaps lost—like the pictorial significance of the individual letters of our alphabet, which everybody uses, but which require a special kind of study and research to explain their real meaning and original forms. ”

“ From what we have said, it will be seen that the relations and harmony of colours form a complex subject, requiring constant and careful study; one, indeed, into which he who would become a colourist must enter heart and soul. ”

“ Similarly in art, we no longer imitate nature, nor copy traditional designs. Art proper appears, shaping bronze and marble into images of the gods, and on a burnt and ruined hill-fort renewing the Parthenon. ”

“ In so far as these ancient traditions live in the memory of man, they are contemporary to us as much as electrical science: for the images which time brings now to our senses, before they can be used in literature, have to enter into exactly the same world of human imagination as the Celtic traditions live in. ”

“ The peoples are dead, but the documents remain; and these documents themselves are part of a living and intimate tradition which also descends to us out of the past,—a tradition so familiar and native to the brain that we forget its origin. We almost believe that our feeling for art is original with us. We are tempted to think there is some personal and logical reason at the back of all grammar, whether it be the grammar of speech or the grammar of architecture,—so strong is the appeal to our taste made by traditional usage. Yet the great reason of the power of art is the historic reason. ”

“ The symbols of the ark, dove, olive branch, and rainbow would be wholly meaningless to people unfamiliar with the Mosaic or some similar cosmology, as would the cross and the crescent be to those ignorant of history.
The loose classification by which symbols would include every gesture or pictorial sign that naturally or conventionally recalls a corresponding idea, only recognizes the fact that every action and object can, under some circumstances, become a symbol. And indeed lovers of the symbolic live in, on, and by the symbols which they manufacture. ”

“ If we now, by a reverse process, inquire of what type this inner life must be, if we are to prove it on its own account adapted to the expression of sound and tones, we may recall the fact already observed that by itself, that is, accepted as a real mode of objectivity, tone, in contrast to the material of the plastic arts, is wholly abstract. Stone and colour receive the forms of an extensive and varied world of objects, and place them before us in their actual existence. ”