Lesson 15
1. Thought
At the time of the impressionists, some innovative theory
on color was being developed. Chevreul was establishing
a color wheel and Rood had just published a work on the
theory of color in 1881, The Impressionists (and Neo-Impressionists)
adopted these theories and arranged their palettes according
to the chromatic tables furnished by the physicists. "Following
the theory that light, broken up in a prism, gives off seven
colors, they adopted these seven colors on their palettes."
They excluded black. Duranty, a prominent writer of the
time, felt that they were handicapped by this. Unlike the
"true" Impressionists, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas,
and Edouard Manet did not exclude black, but used it richly.
(Extracted from Mary Cassatt 1844-1926, National Gallery
of Art, 1970 Exhibition Catalogue)
If you get the opportunity, look at works by various "Impressionists"
and "Neo-Impressionists" and compare the use of
color.
2. Words:
Hue 1. color. 2. a particular variety of a color; shade;
tint.
Chroma the purity of a color, determined by its freedom
from white or grey; color intensity.
Get the difference in meaning of these two words, use them
in some sentences, demonstrate with colors until you feel
personally certain of their difference.
3. Practice: "Learning bears fruit when it is applied."
Exercise: Experiment with only the colors laid out
in a limited palette (one warm and one cool yellow, one
warm and one cool red, one warm and one cool blue) to get
various hues and chroma. Try to get some grays and
browns as well as secondary and tertiary colors by finding
and mixing complementaries. Specifically, see if you can
mix a good yellow ochre and a good earth red, since these
are useful colors.
(Possible colors to use on your "limited palette":
Lemon yellow (a slightly greenish yellow), cadmium or hansa
yellow, cadmium red light or similar orangish red, alizarin
crimson or purplish red, ultramarine blue or cobalt, and
thalo or prussian blue.)
