Colorist

“ Nor can it long be doubted that it is also the most impressive way to others; for the third great advantage possessed by the colorists is, that the delightfulness of their picture, its sacredness, and general nobleness, are increased exactly in proportion to the quantity of light and of lovely color they can introduce in the shadows, as opposed to the black and grey of the chiaroscurists. ”

“ I am beginning to say with conviction that color-schemes are the mark of a narrow and rigid taste—that they are born of convention and are meant not for living things but for wall-papers and portià ̈res and clothes. Moreover, I am really growing callous—or is it, rather, broad? Colors in my garden that would once have made my teeth ache now leave them feeling perfectly comfortable. I find myself looking with unmoved flesh—no creeps nor withdrawals—upon a bed of mixed magentas, scarlets, rose-pinks, and yellow-pinks. I even look with pleasure. ”

“ Probably the effects of colour on educated minds are as various as the tints and shades of tones of the many substances which receive them,—reflected from all surrounding objects, blazing in light, or softened by shadow,—fresh and glowing, or permanently faded—shining with modern varnish, or sobered by the dust of ages.
It is the art of the colourist, whether he paints pictures, or dyes textiles, or embroiders them, to reduce the tints of the prism to an endurable and delightful lowness of tone, while preserving as far as possible all their light and purity. ”

“ Color, if you stop to think, is really the decorative touch which God gives to the universe. It would have been just as easy to make everything gray—every rose but the shadow of itself—every tree and rock and cloud a monotone of gradation. Instead of that, everything we look at, from a violet to an overbending sky, is enriched and glorified by millions of color tones as infinite in their gradation as the waves of sound and light. ”

“ If your taste inclines to more delicate shades, do not be discouraged because by that choice you are told you haven't much sense of colour. That you know in your heart of hearts is not true. The beauty of twilight, or the delicacy of a misty landscape, or the sombreness of the grey old woman in her dark frock have fully as much 'colour' as the gorgeous sunset, or the meadows rioting with gold and crimson blossoms. ”

“ These six bright colours, when used in conjunction with black and white, with each other, or with their complementaries, will strengthen, intensify and enrich each other without altering their true value—when such vivid effects and sharp contrasts offend the taste of the worker, when they appear too crude, too conspicuous and too obtrusive—which they are apt to do—they may be harmonised quite simply, either by modifying the complementaries or by using a tint or a shade, that is, a lighter or a darker tone of the same colour. ”

“ To stain your paper with a slight reddish or yellowish tint, adds to the harmony of a sketch, yet it is a mere matter of taste; but, when it is desired, it had better be done after the drawing is completed, otherwise the colour risks looking patched from the rubber.6
19. In colouring, the sky gives the ruling tint to the landscape; it is absurd to unite a noonday sky, with a landscape of sunset glow.
20. From the three virgin colours, red, blue, and yellow, all the tints of nature are composed.7 There is not in nature a perfect white, except snow, and the petals of some flowers. ”

“ If colour ever appeared in its glory as a daughter of heaven, if there ever was a play of light and shade, in which the noblest emotions of the soul were awakened; if delight, inspiration, poetry and truth and dignity of character, were ever fixed in figures and colouring upon canvas, it was done in that picture, which was more than painting and enchantment. ”

“ We know that the sensation of light or color, if not too weak or too violent, is in itself pleasing. The bright, the glittering, shining object, so long as it is not painful, is pleasantly stimulating. Gems, tinsel, lacquer, polish, testify to this taste, from the most primitive to the most civilized man. Color, too, if distinct, not over-bright, nor too much extended in field, is in itself pleasing. The single colors have been the object of comparatively little study. ”

“ The beauty lies in the colouring. What a feast these ruins afford to the eye by their colour, what a revel of blues, greens, and low-toned reds in their unfaded paintings! Taken as bits of colour only, without dwelling too much on the forms, all in such light, the shadows filled with golden reflections—taken thus, or deeply tinged with the lustrous after-glow, or the golden moonlight, they are all-satisfying. ”

“ As children and men we enjoy the color-effects of fireworks against the blackness of night, and we enjoy the darkness and the shadows about us, the sudden light upon expectant faces, the dark-moving figures in the intervals. All this is delight in color,—color without sentiment, color without story, color without other thought or reflection than pure sensuous enjoyment; and we even feel the tawdry cheapness of the attempt when by set arrangement the features of some local or national celebrity are presented. ”

“ These variations in hue, value, and intensity of color afford specific æsthetic satisfactions. The blueness of the sky is its specific beauty; the greenness of foliage in springtime is its characteristic and quite essential charm. Apart from anything else, sensations themselves afford satisfaction or the reverse. A loud color, a strident or a shrill sound may cause a genuine revulsion of feeling. A soft hue or a pellucid note may be an intrinsic pleasure, though a formless one, and one expressive of no meaning at all. ”

“ What is it so pleasurable that the eye at once receives from the external world, that round it should have gathered all these tributary pleasures? Light—colour—form; but, in reference to our discussion, pre-eminently the exquisite pleasure derived from the sense of light, pure or coloured. Colour, from infancy to old age, is one original, universal, perpetual source of delight, the first and constant element of the Beautiful.
We are far from thinking that the eye does not at once take cognisance of form as well as colour. ”

“ In the first place we have the abstract basis of all colour in light and dark. When we posit this contrast and its transitions by themselves without further distinctions of colour effect, we get thereby simply the contrasts supplied us by white as light and black as shadow together with their transitional grades and nuances, contrasts which offer to the art of drawing its integrating quality, appertaining as they do to the real plastic character of form, and producing the prominence, retreat, rondure, and distance of objects. ”

“ When, therefore, the main relations of colour have been all set out and decided for your window, turn your attention to small differences, to harmonies round the harmonies. Make each note into a chord, each tint into a group of tints, not only the strong and bold, but also the subtle and tender; do not miss the value of small modifications of tint that soften brilliance into glow. Study how Nature does it on the petals of the pansy or sweet-pea. You think a pansy is purple, and there an end? ”

“ Colors get, it is thought, their value for feeling either through some connection with emotionally toned objects, like vegetation, light, the sky, blood, darkness, and fire, or else through some relation to emotional situations, like mourning or danger, which they have come to symbolize. And there is little doubt that such associations play a part in determining the emotional meaning of colors—the reticence and distance of blue, the happiness of yellow, for example, are partly explained through the fact that blue is the color of the sky, yellow the color of sunlight ”

“ More and more, as the supreme artist matures, do we find him disdaining the showier and more evident forms of virtuosity. His colour is more and more marked in its luminous beauty by reticence and concentration, by the search after such a main colour-chord as shall not only be beautiful and satisfying in itself, but expressive of the motive which is at the root of the picture. ”

“ When all is said and done, tone is the result of color relations, so arranged that they produce a rhythmic harmony.
. . . . . .
An artist, when he paints a tonal picture, has in mind the relative dark and light of colors, and their relative coolness and warmth. Let me explain. First the relative coolness or warmth of colors. The artist regards blue as the coolest hue. As a matter of fact violet reflects even less light than blue; still, for his practical purposes, an artist says that the cool hue is blue, and he associates with it violet and green. ”

“ The painters of today have discovered anew the world’s coloring. We now recognize everywhere the power and vivaciousness, the thousandfold freshness, and the infinite changefulness of color. To us colors now talk directly; they are not drowned by covering tints, not hide-bound by a preconceived harmony. ”

“ The mere sensual pleasure of the eye, received from the most brilliant piece of coloring, is as nothing to that which it receives from a crystal prism, except as it depends on our perception of a certain meaning and intended arrangement of color, which has been the subject of intellect. ”

“ Tone and Color. The first thing that seizes the eye in a painting is color, and the brightest, gayest colors are the ones that are most likely to attract. In fact they are the only colors that the inexperienced may see, for many a person is blind to the subdued tints and shades that are really the most attractive to the trained eye. Good coloring, then, does not mean brightness alone. It is the relationship, the qualities and the suitableness of colors one to another, whether they be in shadow, half-tint or light, that constitute good coloring. ”

“ Between these two modes of pursuing it, come two modes of refusing it—one, dark and sensual; the other, statuesque and grave, having great aspect of nobleness.
Thus we have, first, the coarse love of color, as a vulgar person’s choice of gaudy hues in dress.
Then, again, we have the base disdain of color, of which I have spoken at length elsewhere. Thus we have the lofty disdain of color, as in Durer’s and Raphael’s drawing: finally, the severest and passionate following of it, in Giorgione and Titian.
5. Color is, more than all elements of art, the reward of veracity of purpose. ”

“ To return a moment to the problem of color: illusion is frequently lost through a failure to adjust the shade of the high-light and shadow to the tone of the foundation grease paint, or natural complexion. The commonest offence is the use of an unmixed, unblended slate for shadows, and white, and high-lights, whether the underlying color be florid, sallow, pink, or pale flesh. ”

“ This emotional attribute of color is keenly felt even in a work of art as devoid of any intellectual appeal, as a Turkish rug or a Japanese ceramic; but when color is used purposely to enhance and offset some poetic mood of nature, as in a Venetian sunset by Gedney Bunce, or a spring morning by Corot, its poignant charm is overpowering and irresistible. ”

“ Art cannot, indeed, attain its appropriate end, that of pleasing, without excellence in colouring. It is colour which the true artist most loves, and it is colouring in all its complex and high relations, that he ever seeks to attain. Looking above, and around, and beneath him, with the intelligent eye of the colourist, he finds a boundless source of never-ceasing enjoyment. With harmonies and accordances lost to the untutored gaze, colour meets him in every stone he treads on—in the mineral, vegetable, and animal creation—in the heavens, sea, and earth. ”

“ Marny. Paint is not color. Color is an essence, a rhythm, a blending of tones as exquisite as the blending of sounds in the fall of a mountain brook. Match each sound and you have its melody. Match each tone and you have light. ”

“ For I should be sorry if, when you were led by the course of your study to observe closely such things as are beautiful in colour, you had not longed to paint them, and felt considerable difficulty in complying with your restriction to the use of black, or blue, or grey. You ought to love colour, and to think nothing quite beautiful or perfect without it; and if you really do love it, for its own sake, and are not merely desirous to colour because you think painting a finer thing than drawing, there is some chance you may colour well. ”

“ In this wonderful colour—which seemed to borrow the richness of its hue rather from its depth than from any pigment of its own, just as beyond soundings the ocean changes from green to blue—an hundred moods seem to rise slowly from within, to swim visible, even though the mere expression of her face gave no sign of them. ”

“ Two artists will use the same colours, and yet one with an eye for colour will give us beautiful harmonies, and the other one wanting this delicacy of perception will give us crudity. Form in your mind some tone of colour suggested, say, by the warm mellow colours of autumn, the soberer russet and greys of the winter, or the light, fresh, delicate tints of spring, and carry these suggestions out in your decoration. The corner cupboard, Fig. 1, we might tint in the russet tones, and you will find that such colours as raw sienna, raw umber, yellow ochre, terra verte, burnt sienna, chromes Nos. ”

“ What significance have these abstract principles of beauty in the combination of colors for representative art? In the choice of objects with a definite local color, of course, these laws will be found operative. A scheme of blues and yellows is likely to be more effective than one of reds and violets. If we analyze the masterpiece of coloring, we shall find that what we at first supposed to be the wonderful single effects of color is really the result of juxtapositions which bring out each color to its highest power. ”