What's a color? (2nd part)

Except for those artists who work with lights, cinema or in digital art, we use colors as reflected light, especially painters.

The theories around this theme first appear with Aristotle. The two most important ones are the one by Newton (Opticks, 1704) and the one by Goethe (Theory of colours, 1810). The rest of theories come from these two and focus on the color organisation through the chromatic circle and on the issue about the color perception. The nowadays’ theories mostly consist in studies about the color’s tridimensionality, a property useful in cinema and computing, apart from the compatibility between the reproduction systems.

Goethe’s ideas are influential when it comes to color perception: colors interact and they never find themselves isolated. Also, he adds that colors aren’t only related to phsyical and physiological factors, but also cultural and psychological ones.

The organization or systematization of colors isn’t easy at all and the several proposals offered by the researches are quite different. We have here the one presented by J. Itten, composed by 12 colors. You can find the primary colors in the centre (those are red, yellow and blue) and also the result of mixing these colors, which we call secondary colors. The center is surrounded by a ring, where we find the different graduations between the secondary colors.

The colors that are together are analogous. In this display, the tertiary are missing (mixture of 2 complementary colors) and the quaternary colors (mixture of 2 tertiary colors). Also the values are missing, which aren’t colors, just the proportion of white and black.

Color itself has 4 dimensions. Let’s take red as an example:

1) the tone: the pure color, what makes us recognise that that color is red;

2) the intensity or saturation: they can be vivid, brilliant or pale (bourdeaux is a slightly saturated red);

3) the value: how much brightness or darkness it has (a light red - a dark red)

4) the temperature: blue, green and violet are cold colors, while red, yellow and orange are the warm ones. But if a red color is near to blue, adquiring a violet tone, we can say it’s a ‘cold red’, while if it’s closer to yellow, it will turn into an orange, and we would say it’s a ‘warm red’.

In the next post about colors, we will learn about their psychological and cultural dimensions. Why do we use black for ceremonies and funerals? Why is yellow a symbol of bad luck?

cristinadelrosso.com // cristinadelrosso.artproject@gmail.com

Thanks to Web Dog por la fuente Pencilled.

Source:  Welsch-Liebmann, Farben,2004; Nerdinger, W.: Elemente künstlerischer Gestaltung, 1986;  Itten J. Kunst der Farbe 1989; personal notes

Picture: Wikipedia

Translated by Lorenzo Vigo

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