Color Studies

Building Color Schemes - Theory and Practice
 
Join Architectural Color Designer, Amy Woolf for an exploration of creating successful color schemes -- including some history, a little theory and actual practice.
 
Together we will think about and discuss methods of combining colors and follow up with some hands-on exercises with color samples you have obtained in advance. (See below.)
 
Amy's insights will be valuable to anyone interested in the aesthetics of the built environment as well as anyone who has ever struggled putting together a color scheme. Her lessons will also add to the analysis of material and visual culture that has been a theme of this autumn’s meetings.
 
Amy Woolf is an Architectural Color Designer, based in New England, and has been consulting independently for 18 years. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Inter-Society Color Council since 2019. (https://www.awcolor.com/about)
 
Paper Tools

To get the most out of this session, it's helpful to have access to a variety of colors in the same material or form. Here are some options:

• Color Aid Papers: Available in boxes of 220 or 314 colors (220, small size is ideal). These can be found at art supply stores or purchased online.
• The Essential Color Card Deck: A less expensive option with colored cards, smaller than Color Aid papers.
• Solid Origami Paper: Comes in 100 colors, available from various suppliers.
• Paint Chips: Obtainable from a local paint store, where you can often borrow or collect them.
• Other Material Samples: Fabric, laminate, or tile samples work well.
• Printable Color Swatches: Created with your computer and color printer.
• Paper Swatches: Made with colored pencils, crayons, or markers.

Any of these will work for the session.

Paul Smith (University of Warwick) "Cezanne, sensations of colour, and autism"
The essay is available below.
 
Our next meeting (Wednesday, 13 November, 12:00PM EST (UTC -5:00) will feature discussion of a work in Progress. Paul Smith has offered to present "Cézanne, sensations of colour, and autism", a draft of a chapter of his book project on Cézanne, perception, and autism.
Paul’s chapter explores the possibility that the French post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was autistic. It does so by comparing how Cézanne described his colour sensations in letters to friends and colleagues with their materialisation in his paintings, and by examining records of his behaviour and sensory sensitivities. This is an extraordinary opportunity to delve into colour from a different, non-neurotypical, angle and I hope you will take advantage of it.
 
Paul Smith is Professor of the History of Art at University of Warwick. His research interests include colour theory and colour in the works of Seurat, Cézanne and C19th art more generally. Recent writing has looked at the role of psychology and neuroscience to investigate Cézanne’s "slow looking," and explored the science, perception, and depiction of coloured shadows.
 
Organizer: Giulia Simonini

 
Margaret Morgan Grasselli (formerly National Gallery of Art) and Elizabeth Savage (School of Advanced Study, University of London) on Printing Colour 1700-1830: Discoveries, Rediscoveries and Innovations in the Long Eighteenth Century. It can be pre-ordered at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/printing-colour-1700-1830-9780197267530?lang=en&cc=gb .
 
28 October is the official publication date for Printing  Colour 1700 - 1830: Histories, Techniques, Functions, and Receptions. (Oxford University Press 2024, 978-0-19-726753-0).  Join editors Elizabeth Savage and Meg Grasselli, plus selected authors, as we celebrate this landmark work. We'll hear about current research into histories of printing in color and discuss the issues raised when printing books in color about books in color.
 
About the book:
Printing Colour 1700-1830 . . . examines the rich period of invention, experimentation and creativity surrounding colour printing in Europe between two critically important developments, four-colour separation printing around 1710, and chromolithography around 1830. Its 28 essays expand the corpus beyond rare fine art impressions to include many millions of colour-printed images and objects. The chapters unveil the explosive growth in the production and marketing of colour prints at this pivotal They address the numerous scientific and technological advances that fed the burgeoning popularity for such diverse colour-printed consumer goods as clothing, textiles, wallpapers, and ceramics. They recontextualise the rise in colour-printed paper currencies, book endpapers and typography, and ephemera, including lottery tickets and advertisements. This landmark volume launches colour printing of the long 18th century as an interdisciplinary field of study, opening new avenues for research across historical and scientific fields.
 
Elizabeth Savage is a historian of art and print. She specializes in pre-industrial western printing techniques, especially for printing color in late medieval and early modern Europe.
Margaret Morgan (Meg) Grasselli recently retired as Curator of Old Master Drawing at the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC).
 
Organizer: Elizabeth Savage
 
 

We will discuss
 
Georges Roque: « Éléments de méthode d’analyse de la signification des couleurs : expression et contenu » /  “Expression and content: A methodological tool to analyze color meaning”
 
Abstract:
This paper is a chapter from a forthcoming book, Significations des couleurs dans la peinture (17e - 20e siècles). It provides a methodological tool, based on general semiotics, to analyze color meaning, mainly in painting. The method is widely used by semioticians, but not yet (as far as I know) in the field of color. Its starting point is Louis Hjelmslev’s distinction between the expression plane and the content plane, which corresponds roughly to Ferdinand de Saussure's significant (expression) and signifier (content). As each plane is composed of several oppositions the process to create meaning consists of correlating oppositions of the expression plane to oppositions of the content plane. To give just a few examples, the opposition light/dark can be related to day/night, life/death; the opposition between saturated and desaturated can be related to happiness/sadness. In this paper I briefly examine the main oppositions used for the expression plane of color and their possible links to semantic oppositions. I am aware that such links are often too general and cannot replace the context-dependent analysis of a given artwork. However, I argue that this tool can prove useful when we try to understand color meaning in works of art.
 
A philosopher and an art historian, Georges Roque is honorary senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. On color he organized four international symposia whose proceedings have been published and curated three exhibitions. Main books:  La Stratégie de Bonnard. Couleur, lumière, regard, Paris, Gallimard, 2006; Art et science de la couleur. Chevreul et les peintres, de Delacroix à l’abstraction, second revised ed., Paris, Gallimard, 2009; Quand la lumière devient couleur, Paris, Gallimard, 2018; La cochenille, de la teinture à la peinture. Une histoire matérielle de la couleur, Paris, Gallimard, 2021. His latest papers published in English are: “Philosophy and Science”, in A Cultural History of Color In the Age of Industry, vol. 5, (éd. A. Loske), London & New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, p. 33-52 ; “Colour Theory: Definition, fields and interrelations”, AIC Journal of the International Colour Association, vol. 32, 2023, n° special Colour Theory, p. 4-16;
 
Please note that the text proposed for this discussion was written for publication in French. We are including along with the original an English translation made using Google’s AI translator and slightly revised.