The Wonderful World of Color

[william l. palminteri]

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<p ><a href="/photodb/user?user_id=2347092"><em>Arthur Plumpton</em></a><em> </em><a href="/member-status-icons"><em><img title="Subscriber" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/sub4.gif" alt="" /><img title="Frequent poster" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/3rolls.gif" alt="" /></em></a><em>, Jan 15, 2010; 11:26 a.m.</em><br>

<em>Bill, excellent observation. What is great about art, from the cave drawers (Shamen?) 25,000 years ago, to present users of the graphite pen or chalk, is man's ability to express himself in art whatever the medium. <strong>All media are indeed wonderful.</strong></em><strong> </strong></p>

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<p>Arthur, yes, all media sure are wonderful!</p>

<p>Bill P.</p>

[mizore]

<p>Arthur, regarding the cave paintings, do take a look at <em>The Nature of Paleolithic art</em> by R. Dale Guthrie. Also, we're looking at paintings that are 15,000 to 30,000 years old -- how much fugitive pigments were used, dunno. Guthrie has some very interesting theories about who the painters were based on analysis of hand silhouettes (teen aged boys). They did have access to many of the earth pigments, which seemed to match the subject matter fairly well. Lampblack alone would have been easy, hold a stone over a fat-burning lamp (horse fat works very well according to some researches who've been reconstructing Paleolithic lamps and such). They apparently wanted more than black and white, so they were bringing in raw materials from outside to get some color if the colors weren't available as mud on the cave floors. </p>

<p>People went to great lengths to get non-fugitive blue pigments in cloth and art -- indigo dyeing is an extremely smelly process, and I can't imagine that getting ultramarine pigments was all that easy either considering that prior to contact with the Americas, there was only one source for the raw material in Afghanistan (lapis lazuli).</p>

<p> </p><div></div>

[william l. palminteri]

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<p><a href="../photodb/user?user_id=2361079"><em>Fred Goldsmith</em></a><em> </em><a href="../member-status-icons"><em><img title="Subscriber" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/sub3.gif" alt="" /><img title="Frequent poster" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/3rolls.gif" alt="" /></em></a><em>, Jan 15, 2010; 11:49 a.m.</em><br>

<em>I don't think the relationship of paint and canvas (as the medium) to the capturing and use of light is the same kind of essential relationship as it is in photography.</em></p>

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<p>Fred, having been introduced to fine art in the early '50's by my great aunt, a Limoges poreclains painter, I can assue you that painters are intimately connected to light, probably more so than photographers.</p>

<p>Bill P.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Bill, I've known quite a few painters myself, including my mother. Your assurances aside, I'm happy to accept that you might see it differently from me and would welcome an explanation of why you do.</p>

<p>I didn't talk about painters' connections to light or photographers' connections to it. I talked about the mediums.</p>

[aplumpton]

<p>Rebecca, a very nice image. Seeing colour that way, or even with a less limited but still restrained colour spectrum, is one reason why I sometimes forsake my love of B&W for the other medium.</p>

<p>Fred and Bill, I don't think it is easy to argue whether photography or painting in colours has the stronger hold on the use of light. Both mediums depend greatly upon it, whether it is the basic truth of light reflecting from a surface to provide colour and form of an image seen by humans, or whether it is a Rembrandt or a Turner or other, in which light is a highly creative element of the design and of the communication to the viewer.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Arthur, I'm not really arguing anything . . . please understand. I was ruminating and interested in hearing Bill's thinking. You give me room for more thought, though I do tend to feel a difference between light actually being captured in the photographic process and light being expressed with paint.</p>

[aplumpton]

<p>On a non-related issue, do any of you wish that the number of photographers responding to the Photo.Net forums was greater? Most of the PofP topics seem to be a bit moribund, with only one or two active at any one time, but that is also the case of the several other PNet forums I have been scanning recently. Perhaps the New Year has its challenges for others and not everyone can mix work and hobby at home. Some other Internet sites are not of the same quality as PNet and some are not taken quite as seriously (I'm not denying that that can be good at times), so the health of PNet is a concern.</p>

<p>I think that Fred has the same concern, in his mention of hoping to attract new contributors. How can we open the window a bit larger? I guess I am not alone in valuing these forums for the exchange of ideas and a chance to think differently about my own photography? </p>

[william l. palminteri]

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<p ><a href="/photodb/user?user_id=2347092"><em>Arthur Plumpton</em></a><em> </em><a href="/member-status-icons"><em><img title="Subscriber" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/sub4.gif" alt="" /><img title="Frequent poster" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/3rolls.gif" alt="" /></em></a><em>, Jan 15, 2010; 12:55 p.m.</em><br>

<em>On a non-related issue, do any of you wish that the number of photographers responding to the Photo.Net forums was greater?</em></p>

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<p>Arthur, I agree. i don't have much time to devote to the threads, but I do try to participate as much as possible. The topics are interesting to me, and I hope my input helps people. It would be nice to get a broader spectrum of people involved, though.</p>

<p>Bill P.</p>

[aplumpton]

<p>Fred, I think I just realised that my use of the word argue or arguing is spilling over from my French vocabulary, where we use the very similar verb to infer, to deduce, etc., without it being necessarily a more confrontational argument.</p>

<p>I remember my first project in my new job at a French speaking business some decades ago where my boss wanted to know whether a concept I had studied might not be useful to propose to another firm and client. He asked me if I was in agreement with him. I did not understand his word "d'accord", but thought that he wished me to concur with that possibility. As I often do, I took the English word "to concur®" and put an "ence" on it, as some other trans-language word exchanges do. Unfortunately, being "en concurrence" with him had very much the opposite meaning to what I had intended. In French, it meant being in competition! Happily, I was able to save my job by deducing from the instantaneous lowering of his massive black eyebrows that I should reformulate my response.</p>

<p>Anyways, sorry for this slight mistracking from the main theme here.</p>

[william l. palminteri]

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<p ><a href="/photodb/user?user_id=2361079"><em>Fred Goldsmith</em></a><em> </em><a href="/member-status-icons"><em><img title="Subscriber" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/sub3.gif" alt="" /><img title="Frequent poster" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/3rolls.gif" alt="" /></em></a><em>, Jan 15, 2010; 12:16 p.m.</em></p>

 

<p><em>Bill, I've known quite a few painters myself, including my mother. Your assurances aside, I'm happy to accept that you might see it differently from me and would welcome an explanation of why you do.</em></p>

 

<p><em>I didn't talk about painters' connections to light or photographers' connections to it. I talked about the mediums.</em></p>

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<p>Fred, it's been my experience that trying to create the effect of something giving off light using media hat does not give off light is a huge part of the technique of painting, as I'm sure you know. Sure, film has the same characteristics in that it also does not give off light, but the photographer can say "There's a nice subject, let me photograph it. How it will be rendered is the film manufacturer's headache." The artist, let's say painter, says" Nice subject, now how do I render it to look believable with the pigments at hand?"<br>

That's a thimblefull of the dumptruck sized situation that artists face.</p>

<p>Bill P. </p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

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<p>"There's a nice subject, let me photograph it. How it will be rendered is the film manufacturer's headache."</p>

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<p>If it was just that easy...</p>

[william l. palminteri]

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<p ><a href="/photodb/user?user_id=934135"><em>Phylo Dayrin</em></a><em> </em><a href="/member-status-icons"><em><img title="Subscriber" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/sub6.gif" alt="" /><img title="Frequent poster" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/2rolls.gif" alt="" /></em></a><em>, Jan 15, 2010; 01:40 p.m.</em></p>

 

<p><em></em></p>

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<p><em>"There's a nice subject, let me photograph it. How it will be rendered is the film manufacturer's headache."</em></p>

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<p><em>If it was just that easy...</em></p>

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<p>Okay Phylo, how is it not that easy?</p>

<p>Bill P.</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>A musician can render a piece of music from a sheet of paper, a photographer can render an object or subject from a "piece of everything". It's not <em>only</em> the instrument or medium that makes the rendering, is it. If it was just that easy...</p>

[william l. palminteri]

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<p ><a href="/photodb/user?user_id=934135"><em>Phylo Dayrin</em></a><em> </em><a href="/member-status-icons"><em><img title="Subscriber" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/sub6.gif" alt="" /><img title="Frequent poster" src="http://static.photo.net/v3graphics/member-status-icons/2rolls.gif" alt="" /></em></a><em>, Jan 15, 2010; 02:10 p.m.</em><br>

<em>A musician can render a piece of music from a sheet of paper, a photographer can render an object or subject from a "piece of everything". It's not only the instrument or medium that makes the rendering, is it. If it was just that easy...</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>Huh?</p>

<p>Bill P.</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>Yes I know, hard to follow up on.</p>

[clive_murray_white]

<p><strong>Fred:</strong><em> To me, the point of Clive's mentioning Vermeer and Velasquez was to suggest that they, in fact, did have a choice, yet they and so many other master painters chose to paint in color rather than black and white.</em><br>

<em>Clive seems to think it has something to do with color's effectiveness compared to black and white.</em><br>

<em></em><br>

Fred: You are very good at this because you have considerable skill in persisting with a question and drawing out nuances within a topic, in my case you help me find out what I "seem to think". Or even making me realise that "seeming to think" is very much part of my character.</p>

<p>So now back to the point - It would be nice to have a tame psychologist contribute a view about human's relationship with colour. I know that product packaging designers know a hell of lot about the psychology of colour, a neccessity when your product has to compete for attention on the supermarket shelves.</p>

<p>Your quote above triggered the idea that we keep putting little walls up around each visual art based on their medium, I'll call this a craft based approach.</p>

<p>It would be my observation that many/most of this generation of artists have almost no serious attraction to craft (in many quarters "craft" is a very rude word). They don't distinguish between say, painting and photography but see them as being consumed into the more important word "art". (as far as they are concerned.)</p>

<p>This means that they will sub-contract the craft component of their art out to anybody or any company that can get the job done. In my field the briefs for sculpture commissions never mention the time to create/sculpt the work but always say "fabricate" and assume that you will hand your plans over to a specialist manufacturer. In terms of major competitions and survey exhibitions every sculptural media and approach is in it together.</p>

<p>Similarly there's no special craft based deliniation between painting and photography as art, its just the resulting artwork that counts. All of the exhibiting photgraphers that I know now send their work out to be printed. This is part of the general trend.</p>

<p>In recent years all of the craft based arts have taken quite a hammering. If I decided that my art had to be photography based, even though I'm a reasonably competant photographer I'd actually get a top line commercial pro to do it for me, just like ad agencies - the creative person does a good enough version to get the client in the groove, the finished article is done by a pro studio. This all comes about as much from the economics as anything - who's going to buy large format digital speculating that the artworks will re-pay the mortgage.</p>

<p>Having said all this I strongly suspect that a very large section of society pray for the return of artworks that show evidence of their making or have a greater craft component to them.</p>

<p>So not quite about colour but the mechanics of art.</p>

<p>Clive</p>

 

[Norma Desmond]

<p><strong>Clive</strong>, that's a very cool post . . . and thanks. I agree there is more in common to the various mediums of art than separates them. That has to do with expression. And it's good to look at craft in a related but somewhat different light.</p>

<p>I do think there is something very much the same going on with painting, photography, sculpture, music, and dance, etc. Ironically, one of those things is that they can all reference themselves as mediums. The painter, with a brushstroke, can make the viewer very much aware of the medium (Van Gogh). The photographer, with a decisive moment, can make the viewer aware of his medium (Bresson). The filmmaker, both narratively and technically, can make the viewer aware of his medium (Truffaut's <em>Day For Night</em>).</p>

<p>I'm considering a self portrait these days and want to approach it self-reflectively. A bit of that Escher hand drawing the hand that Phylo gave us recently, but perhaps a bit of photographic reflexivity as well. (I'm trying to avoid mirrors/shadows.) Will let you know if I get there.</p>

[william l. palminteri]

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<p ><a href="/photodb/user?user_id=5581841"><em>Clive Murray-White</em></a><em> </em><a href="/member-status-icons"></a><em>, Jan 15, 2010; 04:04 p.m.</em><br>

<em><strong>Fred:</strong> To me, the point of Clive's mentioning Vermeer and Velasquez was to suggest that they, in fact, did have a choice, yet they and so many other master painters chose to paint in color rather than black and white.<br /></em></p>

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<p>Sure they had a choice, but let's keep in mind that the prelims (sketches) for the painting were usually done in pencil or charcoal, and they abounded, usually kinda worthless (pity). Who would want their commissioned portrait to look like a premminary sketch when color was where it was at?<br>

So sure they had choices, but the client dictated policy, just like today.</p>

<p>Bill P.</p>

[inoneeye]

<p>Loose thoughts,<br>

Arthur, "Sometimes the most effective colour photography is based upon an even more limited range." very interesting observation that triggers some pondering for me. I don't know how to answer the questions your comment brings up .. yet.<br>

.</p>

<p>Fred "I don't think the relationship of paint and canvas (as the medium) to the capturing and use of light is the same kind of essential relationship as it is in photography." nor do I. I am picking up on the 'relationship' aspect - including my relationship to the mediums, as creator and as viewer.</p>

<p>At the core <strong>I</strong> am in a different mindset. In painting, I have to construct a foundation to build upon with reflected light, color. As photographer I feel the foundation has been a gift of reflected and incident light. The blank canvas, the process of creating, requires a set of different head muscles to engage... the method of applying color upon color to arrive at my destination is not one I can easily equate to capture and post process of a photo. I can feel the differences having an influence on me and my voice. I can use that to my advantage or just go with it or fight it to challenge the status quo... The creative process in painting and photography has many similarities but as I work the differences are substantial, in particular with light and color (and notably the physicality). <br>

In color I tend to look and go to the potentials to be found in relationships and energies the, 'harmony and discord' 1+1=3 ideas. I am hyper aware of this when I paint, less when I photograph in color because so much of the foundation is a given. My imposed limitation. Perhaps, (i am just now thinking it) that becomes an obstacle for me... when the foundation is a given. I have constructed, from the foundation up in bw. I never tried that in color.. Barbara Kasten for example. </p>

<p>stimulating example Rebecca.</p>

 

[Norma Desmond]

<p><strong>Bill</strong>, good points both about prelims and about clients. Prelims are especially intriguing because, often they weren't meant for public consumption but, perhaps because of that level of "privacy," they often seem to offer us an intimate view, real or perceived. At the Kandinsky exhibit I just saw, I think I recall most of the preliminary sketches being in color.</p>

<p>Some of the people I photograph, depending on the situation, request black and white or color. Most leave it up to me. Often, though I work with subjects, I don't work with them as clients. I suspect the same was true for many painters throughout history who chose color. Then, of course, so many painters weren't painting portraits and, in most of those cases, there wouldn't have been a client, though they may have been commissioned by a client.</p>

<p>P.S. Josh, just noticed your post. Will read, digest, and respond in due time. Thanks.</p>

[clive_murray_white]

<p><strong>Fred</strong>:<em> I'm considering a self portrait these days and want to approach it self-reflectively. A bit of that Escher hand drawing the hand that Phylo gave us recently, but perhaps a bit of photographic reflexivity as well. (I'm trying to avoid mirrors/shadows.) Will let you know if I get there.</em><br>

<em></em><br>

Small world - I got a little fed up using models that I didn't really know too well so I plucked up the courage to think of using myself as model, my problem is that I think my identity is tied up with my glasses - and there are not too many stone sculptures with successful representation of glasses!</p>

<p>I enjoy the photographic self portrait genre almost as much as the "flying dog". Lartigue et al.</p>

<p>I know what you mean re mirrors but dreaming up another scenario that allows you show that it is actually a self portrait as opposed to a portrait could be a very worthwhile journey.</p>

<p>To get it back on thread Colour, B+W, both?</p>

<p>Clive</p>

<p> </p>

[clive_murray_white]

<p>Just as I finished writing my previous post I became aware that there was gardening talkback on the radio - Eureka: why do people like flowers?</p>

<p>Understand this and we may understand more about why we inately respond to colour.</p>

<p>Clive</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>

<blockquote>

<p>I know what you mean re mirrors but dreaming up another scenario that allows you show that it is actually a self portrait as opposed to a portrait could be a very worthwhile journey.<br>

To get it back on thread Colour, B+W, both?</p>

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</p>

<p>Lee Friedlander !</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

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<p>Understand this and we may understand more about why we inately respond to colour.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I've never thought of myself as responding to color, and color only. Response to context seems more "naturally", don't know if we can take color for the context that we're responding in. Green lights : Go ! Red lights: Stop ! That's just one context, but for which there are many more, and this for only two colors. Proof to me that it's not the colors we're responding to but more the context ( red can also be: passion, go for it, <em>do it </em>as much as danger, blood, stop, run ! )</p>

<p>" There's blood on your legs, I love you. " </p>

<p>Imagine that image in a photograph ; is it about a love song or not ?</p>

[inoneeye]

<p>"I've never thought of myself as responding to color, and color only." Phylo. Since color is rarely presented in a vacuum or near vacuum, I would go there to. But I think of color as an integral part of my response. In simplest terms the color of the walls in a room play a significant part in my emotional response to it. Am I feeling relaxed or fidgety. Energized or lethargic. Are there multiple colors at play. These relationships influence my mood. Of course the 'other' elements and context are not insignificant. I found Van Gogh's work to be weighted strongly to those color considerations. The context was always secondary in my viewing. A field, a vase of flowers, a room, a 'straight' self portrait. It can be powerful and loaded consideration in photography as well.</p>

<p>Fred introduced Nan Goldin. I think that her work being in color and how she used it was one of the distinctions that struck me when I first encountered it. The way many Cuban photographers cash in on the 'carnal' qualities of their environment is very striking and unique to me. The context has another face in that work. Color clearly has a voice of it's own. But is still finding it's way in photography in new ways.</p>