(3) Just Like Robinson Crusoe

Once I could conceive of yellow occurring in dark shades I was able to consider the notion of all colors occurring at all levels of light-to-dark "value." 

I repainted a previously very unappealing color wheel put out by a manufacturer of artists' pigments, using browns for dark yellows and oranges, and putting pinkish-purplish printers' red in the position previously occupied by firetruck red.   The outcome was pleasantly surprising.  

First, everything looked more vibrantly and autonomously alive.

Second, I had a more useful model for painting from life, with its subtler shades and greater attention to browns (which, I found, were set off wonderfully by pale shades of purple and blue--the classic complements for yellow and orange).

Third, I found that once the positions of the colors were shifted to accommodate magenta being true visual red, all the classic rules about color combinations became at once more sensible and more appealing. 

In the past, red and green--no matter how pleasant their emotional associations with Christmas--had not held much visual appeal for me.  But once magenta was paired with green, or red-orange (the firetruck color that we have been taught to call "red") was paired with blue-green, the effects were considerably more pleasing to my eye.

At about this point, I also happened to see a museum exhibit depicting the color theories of Herbert Munsell.  While I didn't agree with everything I saw and read here, I found the Munsell Color Solid extremely enlightening.  Also, a general congruence between Munsell's principles and my own suggested (at least to my mind) that if either of us was on the right track, we probably both were.

<>I also began to receive various other kinds of positive reinforcement for my new ways of thinking about color.  People tended to find a certain fresh and luminous quality about the colors in my paintings. 

And on a more mundane level, one day I happened to be looking at printers' PMS (Pantone Matching System) instructions for a color that no layman would hesitate to call red, and found that it required exactly equal portions of my "true visual red" (magenta) and yellow.  What these instructions thus seemed very strongly to suggest was that what we're used to calling "red" is, in the sense of being halfway between red and yellow on the color wheel, actually orange.

It was at about this point that I decided I had the basis to begin working on a more theoretical type of abstract painting.

© COPYRIGHT 1993 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.