Emmy Savage » Blog

Color Theory Workshop January 2022

Based on The Art of Color by Johannes Itten (Itten’s words appear in bold italics. Otherwise, this text is my interpretation of Itten’s book or includes my own observations about color and my process.)

            Color theory is a convergence of sciences: the physics of light and the physiology and biology of beings that perceive light. Light occurs as both particles and colorless waves or wave lengths. The human brain perceives the reflection of light wave lengths between 400 and 700 millimicrons as different colors. Objects like the gem stones rubies, sapphires and emeralds are not inherently colored red, blue, and green. Their colors are “subtractive.” What distinguishes them are their absorptive qualities. The ruby absorbs the light waves we perceive as blue and yellow and reflects the light waves we perceive as red. The sapphire absorbs the light waves we perceive as red and yellow and reflects the waves we perceive as blue, and the emerald absorbs the light waves we perceive as red and reflects those we perceive as green (or yellow and blue). So, the other crucial ingredients to producing color besides light waves are the eyes and brains of the beings that perceive them. You might say that color is all in our minds. The eyes and brains of hummingbirds are especially attuned to the color red and red flowers. Bees take delight in “seeing” yellow and purple golden rod and asters in late summer fields. And humans, who aren’t even collecting nectar, can perceive all colors (unless they are color blind) through the workings of their brains and their capacity to process the information they receive from the rods and cones of their eyes. The paint we use is also absorptive. If you mix the three primaries, red, blue, and yellow, you will get what is called “chromatic” black. If you mix these darks with white you will get “chromatic” greys.

            I never use either black or grey such as an ivory black or a Payne’s grey. I mix all my blacks or darks and greys from colors and thus, I feel, they harmonize better with the other colors in my painting. In fact, I have made it a rule that I stick to a limited palette and all the colors I use in a painting include all the other colors from that palette. My first limited palette I learned from Susan Crile, a visiting artist in the program I was enrolled in. Her suggested palette included: cobalt and ultramarine blue, cadmium red light and alizarin crimson, and cadmium yellow light and medium, and titanium white. The principal behind this arrangement is a palette that includes a warm and cool version of each of the three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow. The palette I now use is quirky but still follows this principal. I now use quinacridone magenta and transparent orange, quinacridone purple, cadmium yellow light and medium, cobalt and ultramarine blue, yellow ochre and titanium white. Another bit of instruction I received while I was in school was never to mix chromatic colors with earth colors. That pretty sums up the total instruction that I received but I think both pieces of advice were good.

            Not all art is driven by color. But for some artists, color is the imperative that drives them to make art. Some artists to look at for their use of color are Van Gogh, Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard, Wayne Thiebaud, Wolf Kahn, Joan Mitchel, Joseph Albers, Mark Rothko, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Richard Diebenkorn and Dennis Sopczynski. 

            Color can be about so many things. Here are a few: music, passion, desire, intimacy, touch, smell, hearing, temperature, atmosphere, expansion, compression, dissolution, longing, joy, heart break, grief, eroticism, transgression, mystery, rebellion, serenity, the landscapes of the imagination or human emotion. Others?

            If your art is driven by color, you will search to make your colors exquisite enough to break a glass or a heart. What is the music that moves you?  Hear it as you paint. Your colors must become intuitive and highly personal. How you make colors will always be how you make colors and not how anyone else makes them. Listen first to your heart. Practice and mix colors until you see paint on the insides of your eyelids as you fall asleep.

            What you paint on and with will greatly affect your color. Use good quality colors. For oil painters, Gamblin paints are probably the lowest priced good quality paint. I use Daniel Smith and Vasari. The medium or thinner you use also has a bearing on how your colors look. A good turpentine used to have just the right amount of lusciousness but we can’t use it anymore. I use a thinner by Sennelier which I love but it only comes in very small bottles and takes forever to dry. I think mineral spirits dries the paint and diminishes the color but you can get around this with a good picture varnish when your painting is dry. Painting with oil on an acrylic gesso ground will also impart a dry quality to your paint. I like painting on Arches Huile paper or on linen primed with oil paint. Some of the most beautiful and luminescent color painted on acrylic gesso will look dull and dry but painted on an oil ground, will look luscious.  In the old days, white lead was the preferred ground but, for obvious reasons, we can’t use that anymore. I think Wayne Thiebaud may have used a white lead ground and he lived to 102. But the environmental damage seems to be too great to risk. Titanium white is probably the best substitute if you are preparing your own surfaces. If you don’t mind stretching canvases, I recommend Claessens oil primed linen. You can get it single or double primed. If you don’t want to stretch canvases, Raymar art panels makes high quality panels with single or double oil primed linen or Arches Huile paper.

            Wayne Thiebaud used the standard mixture of one part turpentine to one part damar varnish to one part stand or linseed oil. It is hard to obtain damar varnish now, and as noted, turpentine is now no longer used. But the point is, the effects he achieved depended on his materials. I am still trying to find good equivalents.

             I apologize to any acrylic users. I have little experience with them. A painter I admire, Colorado artist Stephen Quiller, has written several books on painting with acrylics. You can probably obtain them from his website.

            The following details about color theory are important to know but I am not suggesting a paint-by-numbers approach to painting. I am suggesting that you develop an informed intuition. In my own work, over many years of painting, I have been piecing away at learning about color. I haven’t felt overwhelmed because I kept my inquiries very narrow. I did a series of still lifes once based on comparing the complements blue and orange and using blue instead of grey for shadows and a sense of volume. I kept my inquiry simple without thinking about the other myriad elements of color theory. Over the years I have also been interested in learning how to mix greys. This is because of my fascination with what Itten calls “simultaneous contrast” about which we will learn later.

Color and Value Effect

The art of color is the art of illusion. Here are some of the effects we can achieve using the illusory properties of color.

1. A white square on black will look larger than a black square of the same size on white. White expands, black contracts.

2. A light grey square looks dark on a white background but the same square will look light on a black background.

3. A yellow square will look dark on a white background and light on a black background.

4. Red looks dark and cold on white and luminous, brilliant and warm on black.

5. Blue on a white background looks dark and deep; on black it looks luminous and brilliant.

6. A neutral grey square on a blue background looks orange and warm; the same grey square looks blue and cold on an orange background.

7. Warm colors—red, orange, and yellow will look darker in low light and cool colors—blue, green, and violet will look lighter in low light.

From Itten: “If color is the chief vehicle of expression, composition must begin with color areas, and these will determine the lines. He who first draws lines and then adds color will never succeed in producing a clear, intense color effect. Colors have dimensions and directionality of their own, and delineate areas in their own way.”  I have found this an extremely difficult concept to wrap my head around and I am still struggling with it. Discerning the directionality and weight and size of colors is a non-verbal art and as such, almost impossible to articulate or explain, even as I am painting myself.

The Language of Color (defining terms)

            A color’s value refers to where a color corresponds to the greys on a scale between black and white. Pure yellow has a light value, pure red or blue have dark values.

            There are three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. By mixing these we can produce the three secondary colors: orange (red and yellow), green (blue and yellow), and violet (red and blue). Each of these secondaries is the complement of the color that was not used to create it. Thus orange (yellow and red but not blue) is the complement of blue. Red is the complement of green and yellow is the compliment of violet.  If we mix each secondary color so as to favor one or the other of its components, we get the six tertiary colors that include red orange and yellow orange, red violet and blue violet, and blue green and yellow green. A hue is a color. A color that is fully saturated is the purest, densest version of that color without any white or darks added to it. Saturated pure colors are going to have different values. A saturated yellow will always be lighter than a saturated green or orange. As you add white to a color you lighten its value but you diminish its saturation, intensity, and brilliance.

The Seven Contrasts

            While music is made up of notes, one note doesn’t make music. It takes many notes together to make music. Like music, Itten maintains we perceive color through its relationships with other colors and we can design a painting and direct the eye through seven basic contrasts. These range in complexity and some, I think, are more interesting than others.  Itten cautions that a painting that revolves around a single contrast will also include others but he advises they should be subservient to the primary contrast.

1. Contrast of Hue. This is the most basic contrast. Mondrian used this contrast to great effect in his paintings that used only the three primaries: red, yellow, and blue. The varying sizes of his rectangles of color introduce another source of contrast along with the juxtaposition of grey rectangles and black outlines.

2. Contrast of Light and Dark. Recall here that lightening or darkening a color reduces its saturation. Itten uses Rembrandt as an example of a painter who constructs his paintings around a contrast of light and dark, sometimes within the range of a single color.

3. Contrast of warm and cool. This is one of the instances where the illusory properties of color become very interesting. Studies of temperature perception reveal that people experiencing the exact same temperature perceive it to be 5 to 7 degrees warmer or cooler depending on the color of the room. Race horses whose stables were painted red orange remained agitated, in a sweat, and pacing and pawing the ground after a workout while horses stabled in stalls painted blue or green became quiet, stopped sweating, and enjoyed their oats. Even more curious, flies remained active in the red orange stalls and became dormant in the blue green counterparts. Warm colors include yellow, orange, and red, and cool colors include blue, green, and violet.  Most commonly, contrasting warm and cool offers us the potential to use color to express temperature and spatial relationships. Cool colors recede and warm colors appear to come forward. Some other contrasts that we can infer using cool and warm colors are shadow/sun, sedative/stimulant, airy/earthy, light/heavy, wet/dry, and transparent/dense or opaque. Can you think of others?

4. Contrast of Complements. Any complementary pair includes all of the primary colors. A complementary pair doesn’t always have the same degree of light/dark contrast. Violet and yellow are wide apart in their degrees of light and dark while red and green are nearly identical in value. The eye requires a color generate its complement and in answering that need exact complements in the correct proportions create stability.  When the complementary pairing is skewed slightly one way or the other, say instead of blue/orange we contrast blue and yellow orange, we introduce an element of instability and a more dynamic pairing.

            I find the contrast of complements and what Itten terms “simultaneous contrast” in his fifth contrast to be the most interesting and they are the ones I try to explore when I paint. Here is what Itten has to say about complements: We call two colors complements if their pigments, mixed together, yield a neutral gray-black. Physically, light of two complementary colors, mixed together, will yield white.

            Two such colors make a strange pair. They are opposite, they require each other. They incite each other to maximum vividness when adjacent, and they annihilate each other, to gray-black when mixed—fire and water.

            Both the phenomenon of afterimage and the effects of simultaneity illustrate the remarkable physiological fact, as yet unexplained, that the eye requires any given color to be balanced by the complementary, and will spontaneously generate the latter if it is not present……

            Two complementary colors can be used to make beautiful chromatic grays.

            Many paintings based on complementary contrast exhibit not only the contrasting complementaries themselves but also their graduated mixtures as intermediates and compensating tones. Being related to the pure colors, they unite the two into one family. In fact, these mixed tones often occupy more space than the pure colors.

5. Simultaneous Contrast I consider this and the preceding one to be the most interesting of all of Itten’s contrasts. It is based on the fact that the human brain requires a color’s complement. This can be demonstrated by staring at the primary and secondary colors surrounding an identical grey square. While the color of the grey square doesn’t change, it will appear to do so depending on the color surrounding it. Thus, the square will appear violet if it is placed on a yellow background, blue on an orange, green on a red, and so on. Here is what Itten has to say:

            Simultaneous contrast results from the fact that for any given color the eye simultaneously requires the complementary color, and generates it spontaneously if it is not already present. By virtue of the fact, the fundamental principle of color harmony implies the rule of complementaries.

            The simultaneously generated complementary occurs…in the eye of the beholder and is not objectively present.

            The simultaneous effect occurs not only between a gray and a strong chromatic color, but also between any two colors that are not precisely complementary. Each of the two will tend to shift the other towards its own complement, and generally both will lose some of their intrinsic character and become tinged with new effects. Under these conditions, colors give an appearance of dynamic activity. Their stability is disturbed, and they are set in changeable oscillation. They lose their objective character and move in an individual field of action of an unreal kind, as if in a new dimension. Color is as if dematerialized. The principle that the agent of a color sensation does not always agree with its effect is fully operative.

            That’s a lot to take in. And trust me, I don’t think about these very complicated observations as I paint. What I do though, is to limit a painting to exploring the dynamic of one complementary pair, usually orange and blue, but lately I’ve been looking at yellow and violet. I mix all of my greys and colors out of the same colors, and usually I can let my intuition guide me. Given the fact that so much is going on in how we perceive color, I feel it best to limit the oscillations as Itten calls them, unless of course, agitation is something I want to incorporate in the meaning of a painting.

6. Contrast of Saturation. Contrast of saturation is the contrast between pure intense colors and dull, diluted colors.

7. Contrast of Extension. I’ve used the observations in this seventh contrast if I’m having trouble with a painting. It is based on the observation that for a given pair of complementaries, it may take different amounts of each color in a pair to produce a stable balance. If I cut a rectangle into fourths, it would only take 1/4th of the rectangle painted as yellow to balance 3/4ths of the rectangle painted as violet. If I cut the rectangle into thirds, it would take 1/3^rd of the rectangle painted as orange to balance 2/3rds of the rectangle painted as blue. And red and green balance each other in equal amounts so the rectangle would only be divided into two.

            My suggestion for trying to integrate a greater sensitivity and confidence into your use of color is to look at the work of artist’s you admire. Try to find out how they produced their work. Analyze their work. Alice Neel incorporates a blue outline into her later portraits which complements and enlivens the warm flesh tones of her subjects. Bonnard distributes his colors throughout the whole composition rather than confining and binding them to discrete objects. His color allows the viewer to float like a woman in a warm bath or sit before a window open to a view of the Mediterranean. The true subject matter is not the woman in the bath but the color and how it allows us to transcend our own boundaries and float in a landscape of longing and desire, of temperature, and atmosphere, and a momentary escape from impermanence and grief.

            Sadly, one of the artists I always turn to for my own questions about color has just passed away, Wayne Thiebaud. I look at his outlines of color and the color of his spaces, his whites that aren’t white and his greys that are always exactly the right greys. He is an artist where the contrast of complements and simultaneous contrast come alive. He describes beginning a painting using unmixed primaries and secondaries to draw the outlines of the subjects he is painting. Later, you can see these vibrant colors peeking out at the edges of things. His results aren’t planned but he sets things up so he has great accidents to choose from. Think of developing a painting as a process of making inquiries and choices. Leave room for surprises because otherwise, your work can become tedious. Keep your focus narrow. Don’t try to take on the whole world. If you love paint and color, the world will be there.  

A Few Inquiries

1. Mix several greys from a complementary pair. Compose a composition of shapes made up of these new greys along with notes of your original complementary hues.

2. Mix some chromatic darks that you can use instead of black. What saturated hue will glow set against these darks? What proportions will you use when you place them all together?

3. Contrast warm and cool colors and group them in a simple composition. Where do the colors come forward? Where do they recede?

4. Make a grid of colors that reflect your own sense of color harmony. You can include saturated colors, greys, whites, and darks. What proportions will you use? Will one color, or temperature, or value dominate?

5. Design your own inquiry based on one of Itten’s seven contrasts.

The following essay is taken from my book, Walking the Stations in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

On Making Art

It’s not at all,” landscape artist Irene Buszco responds to people who ask if painting is relaxing. People commenting that my work is serene also leap to a similar conclusion. They imagine that I must be serene, and therefore, making art must be relaxing. It’s not unlike the common misconception that meditation is relaxing. It is, if you like wrestling with snakes. And sure, once you’ve practiced a good while, meditation can produce habits of mind that can offer serenity, but I wouldn’t equate it with a nap in the hammock. I can’t speak for other artists, but, for me, making art can be frustrating and challenging. While it indeed involves playfulness, intuition, and spontaneity, it also involves making choices, decisions, and constant reference to what I know about color, materials, application, composition, and what works and doesn’t. All this is true, but making art, at its best, is also an act of faith.  

I started to teach myself to draw when I was a senior in college, following the instructions in Kimon Nicolaïdes’ book, The Natural Way to Draw. I still consider this to be the most organic and useful instruction I ever received, and it supports what I have come to know: you may have a talent for drawing and painting, but without constant practice, your skills will never develop. Being an artist isn’t much different from playing the piano. You don’t get good at playing the piano by not playing the piano.

It has taken me years to become the artist I am today, and even now, I don’t consider that I have arrived where I want to be. My progress has had frequent interruptions and setbacks, but I have found, even from these, I can learn and grow.

For a long time after my divorce, I didn’t have the space or time to make art. When I finally did, I picked up a medium I’d never used before: pastels. I began making large abstract drawings based on the expressionist principals of movement and making authentic and unstudied marks. I had an array of gorgeous colors to choose from, and I drew with these colors as I imagine a composer creates with sound, listening to each chord and color for how it anticipates the next. It was a thrilling breakthrough.

Another breakthrough came out of not having to mix the colors. So, while I usually started with the landscape colors I loved, I found myself reaching for the burnt oranges, magentas, and deep purples in order to add depth and soul to the greens, blues, and greys.

In contrast to breakthroughs, we artists can also back ourselves into corners. We can copy what worked before and fail to challenge ourselves by trying something new. Or harder still, to keep working when we hit rough patches. When at its most satisfying, our work can pick up old strands and inquiries that we’ve abandoned, and we discover that they were valid after all. What was past can become present and reinvigorate our current efforts.

There is a loneliness about my Colorado paintings. As artists, we are often asked for a statement explicating our work. I would usually offer that my work explored the relationship between landscape, solitude, contemplation, and spiritual encounter with absence and presence. A bit high-flown. Often, we artists don’t have a clue what our work is about until we’ve been doing it awhile. We are the folks who read the directions after we’ve put the desk or table together. But if I were to elaborate further on absence and presence in my landscape paintings, I would ask the viewer to consider that the presence of God isn’t in the landscape at all. God becomes present in the exchange and communion between me (the painter and observer), and you (the viewer), and the empty land.

To anyone asking, I would also mention that my work included plein air studies of barns, fences, corrals, and cattle chutes at the old Baca Ranch that is now a National Wildlife Refuge. These structures had a haunted quality derived from the absolute silence that surrounded them and the absence of any human or domestic animal presence in their midst. Frequently my colleague Beatris would join me, and because we could rely on calm weather in autumn, we often worked next to the broad-leafed cottonwoods as they turned gold.

I was fascinated by how these abandoned human structures rested within a context of the natural ones: earth, sky, and mountains. The natural gestures are extravagant, the human work-a-day. The human ones express what is best about our best gestures: functionality, ingenuity, optimism, hard work, and humility.

Within the barnyard and sight of the fences and chutes, there is a palpable spirit presence, probably of all the animals that have passed through. I once encountered a group of U.S. Forest Service mules corralled behind the barn for the summer. These beautiful animals who stand at seventeen hands, had been loaned for packing the Field Institute into Willow Lake and were idling there until they would be called upon to bring the trail builders out again. On meeting these gentle and intelligent creatures, I couldn’t help but break into a smile as they breathed their collective blessing over the landscape and me. Who in the world would understand if I told them my paintings of this place are about animal souls?

The following in an essay from my book, Walking the Stations in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Landscape and Sacred Ground

I think of landscape as both a subject in art as well as a place to walk in and explore. Landscape was slow to be celebrated in Western art while the great Song artists in China were painting “streams and mountains without end” as early as the 1200s.[1] The English painter John Constable is generally acknowledged to be the first Western painter to look at clouds, skies, hills, and trees as subjects worthy in themselves. I was fortunate to grow up surrounded by landscape that was, for the most part, empty of human presence. Also, as a child, I had access to one of the great museums of the world with its treasure of French landscape paintings. There is a small Monet in the National Gallery of a lake with rushes, goldenrod, clouds, and blue sky, which I credit for my becoming a landscape painter.

Landscape has always held for me an allure and sense of mystery, a longing I associate with the wail of the train whistle that edged the farms and forests of my first childhood home. To walk across landscape as Wilfred Thesiger did across Arabia’s Empty Quarter, or to live and work in landscape like Thoreau, is to achieve communion and consummation. The ground we walk across is always sacred. It is the ground of creation itself, and millions of years of geologic—and millennia of human, plant, and animal history—repeat that holy act. Columbian mammoth and bison bones lie in the earth at the foot of the Sangres south of Crestone at the Great Sand Dunes National Park, and humans have been hunting, meeting, trading, and living in the San Luis Valley for thousands of years. This background of footsteps even included a friend’s grandfather’s, who herded sheep up Dimick Gulch before the land was closed by the Wilderness Act in 1964.

Walking in the landscape of the Sangre de Cristo requires a rhythm, an entering and a leaving, a physical engagement, a preparedness and mental alertness, a respect and, perhaps more than anything else, senses of wonder, humility, and gratitude. Walking in such a place becomes a metaphor for spiritual practice. Walking begins at the same rate as the resting heart.

Thesiger said if there had been roads across the Empty Quarter, his walking across it would have been nothing more than a stunt.[2] But there were no roads, and always there was the real possibility he would die, either at the hands of the people who lived there, or from thirst and exposure. There are few roads into the Sangres; the mountains are steep, and the trails are difficult. Two paved roads bracketed my section of the Sangres: Poncha Pass at the northern terminus of the range and La Veta Pass at its midpoint. In between there were only two, four-wheel-drive, high-clearance roads: Hayden Pass and Medano Pass Primitive Road. There are no continuous trails that run north to south along the range. Most trails are vertical, east to west or west to east, and most trails do not cross the range but end in glacial cirques, often at an alpine lake.

When I first began walking in the Sangre de Cristo, I didn’t know why I was called to do so, called to walk into a place of absence, a desert and alien place, a place of stark and terrible beauty. Whatever our landscape, the language we create when we are truly present to place can offer us a deeper intimacy with mystery. And—however futile—the search for a language that can enter into that mystery is itself an act of prayer.