Colour Temperature - What's cool in one place is warm in another.

Daily Practice Exploring Colour Temperature

Putting brush to paper is only one of the many ways to explore the limitless possibilities that colour offers the artist.The most important tool to keep well honed and to use on a daily basis is our eyes. After all, we perceive colour only because our eyes do the job of translating light waves into what we call colour.  We live in a world of colourless surfaces.  It is only when light strikes the surfaces and bounces back in an infinite array of light waves that the magic of colour can be observed and interpreted.  When I encourage artists to have a daily colour practice, I consider observing, with the eyes only, equally as beneficial as recording observations with paint.  In fact, alternating the two has proven more beneficial for me than only working with paint on a daily basis.  

One can say, as long as we have our eyes open, we are observing. Unconscious observing is not what I’m referring to.  I’m referring to conscious observation. It is the process of taking notice of what visually grabs your attention and then taking the time to look more carefully to discern what it is that has made you take notice.  It might be a shape, a pattern, a single colour, a combination of colours or a beautiful line.  The reason that conscious observation without putting paint to paper can be beneficial is that the observation can only be recorded within the brain.  There is nothing in your sketchbook to refer back to. I have to imprint what I see onto the sketchbook in my brain.  Later, when I return to the studio, I may … or may not … colour map my observation.  By recording from my memory, I automatically tap into whatever thoughts and emotions I had at the time of observation.  The resulting colour map can’t help but express the colours I observed, altered by my experience. I’m far more interested in expressing my experiences through my art than I am of expressing any sort of reality for which I have no feelings.

Last week, I chose to focus on the warm and cool nature of colour pigments.  This is such a multi-layer topic that I often find it overwhelming.  The more I explore the nature of colour temperature, the more complicated and enriching I find it to be.  I decided to attempt the task of simplifying colour temperature exploration into linear steps that I could more easily present in a workshop.  I began the task several years ago and ending up sinking into quicksand, buried by the vast possibilities and the universal debates over warms and cools.  Now that I’m working on a thirty year plan for myself, I’m once again taking on the challenge. 

During the week, I put together half a dozen slideshows illustrating different aspects of pigment temperature.  In order to place images into the appropriate slideshow, I had to keenly observe how I used colour temperature in the paintings, whether purposefully or not. Many of the choices were intuitive and many were consciously experimental.  The intuitive choices were most often based on lessons learned during my daily colour practice.  I found that several of the images could be placed in more than one slideshow.  Of course.  Colour has value (tone), hue, saturation and temperature.  Each one of those characteristics appears differently depending on what the adjacent colour shapes are.

With my mind  having focused for hours on contemplating the warms and cools of colours in paintings, my eyes continued to scour the landscape for temperature nuances as I drove home from Maryland.  I was only two minutes from home, driving up Newport Road when I became aware of the colour of the pavement. It had a mossy green colour that I found odd. As I looked more carefully, I saw that it also had greenish grays and blue-green grays.  At first, I thought it must be reflecting light from the trees on either side of the road.  It certainly wasn’t reflecting the cerulean blue of the sky. The pavement was mostly in shadow.  Nevertheless, I knew that some of the cerulean blue was effecting the colour of the road.  Our roads are not smoothly paved.  A layer of tar is put down, gravel is poured on top and then the gravel is pressed into the tar. I continued to ponder the odd greenish tinge as I turned the last bend.  Just ahead of me an abrupt change in colour occurred.  A newer section of paving didn’t have a speck of green.  Instead, it looked to be a mix of blue-gray, blue-violet and violet-gray. 

I have driven along that road for thirty years.  I’ve walked that road almost daily for thirty years.  I never noticed the colours and the colour temperatures that I noticed that day returning home.  I wondered if the chemical makeup of the tar might have been different, causing the the reflected light waves to indicate a different translation to my eyes and creating the illusion of different colours. The light from the sun and the sky was the same on both sections of the road.

Another observation was that the colour scheme of the scene was not harmonious.  The cerulean blue of the sky was, for me, definitely not harmonious with the road colours.  It worked well with the trees and the fields, but not the colours reflecting off the road.

Hah!  That led me to the reason that I often find disharmony in painting reality that includes  manmade elements.  Nature has a way of always being harmonious.  When manmade objects are introduced, the harmony can be thrown off in spite of the light sources being the same, the sun and the sky.  Think of structures made of natural materials such as stone, terracotta, slate, or colored with natural ochres.  Those structures harmonize with the landscape.  Then think of the towns where the houses are painted in all sorts of colours and roofs of all different manufactured materials.  The buildings often stick out like a sore thumb, not necessarily because of their shapes, but because of their colours.

That was a lot to think about after about thirty seconds of conscious observation when rounding the last bend on my journey home.

During the live Colour Play zoom session yesterday, Colour temperature was the topic of discussion.  It’s no surprise that we went overtime.  The colour temperature slideshows will be shared in the upcoming week’s videos for those of you who have joined Colour Play in Art.  I’m excited about getting back to my project of “simplifying the exploration of colour temperature”.  I welcome thoughts, ideas and comments regarding your own use of colour temperature in your work.

Thank you for reading my blog.

Chris Carter