Color as Abstract Pattern: Making Color Sing, Chapter 19

I am really in the tall grass on this chapter of Making Color Sing. It’s one of the shortest chapters, and, to me, one of the most incomprehensible.

The entire chapter is an exercise, I suppose, although it’s one I find hard to follow.

Let’s take the previous lesson on color vibrations one step further into developing an abstract color pattern. You may have tried to design a painting with a strong underlying compositional pattern, but have you ever thought to design a painting with an exciting color pattern? Although imperceptible to the viewer, an underlying color pattern can set up a lively vibration.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, p. 98

I’m a little lost here already, but unfortunately, it doesn’t become clearer. Rather than provide general instructions, Dobie simply instructs you to follow along with her example. But I found it difficult to understand how she made the decisions she did in the example, and how to repeat them in my own work.

If I may paraphrase:

• She chose complementary colors – red and green.
• Because she feels red overpowers green, she lowered the chroma of the red (before the first step – “wrong” version not shown).
• She painted them in a simple pattern with equal amounts of red and green. (Step 1)
• Still feeling that the red overpowered the green, she made the size of the green smaller, and changed the shapes. (Step 2)
• She added variety to the shapes. (Step 3)

Dobie then shows a landscape painting that she says was made based on this pattern, although I only see a vague resemblance.

That’s it, that’s the whole chapter. We’re supposed to just… do that, I guess.

The Art of Balancing Colors

In both this chapter and the previous, the concept of “balancing” complementary colors to increase vibration has been touched on. Dobie acknowledges that you can’t just slap down equal amounts two complementary colors and expect a vibration: generally one color overpowers another. To bring them into balance, you need to lower the power of the more powerful color, or raise the power of the less powerful color. The ways she has done this include:

• Adjusting chroma (higher chroma = more power)
• Changing the amount of space the colors take up (less space = more power)

This is all sort of implied. At no point does she explain which colors overpower which, except the example that red overpowers green. Nor does she specifically explain how to increase or decrease the power of different colors, except again by examples.

The other day, while looking for something else in Nita Leland’s Exploring Color Workshop, I found out more about the theory of which colors overpower which. In a section called “Quantity Contrast” (p. 124 of the 30th Anniversary Edition), Leland refers to an out-of-print work, The Art of Color by Johannes Itten. Itten offers a specific formula for understanding the relative power of different complements:

• Yellow is 3x more powerful than violet; you need 3 parts violet to balance 1 part yellow
• Orange is 2x more powerful than blue; you need 2 parts blue to balance 1 part orange
• Red and green are equally balanced.

I like that this offers a specific formula, although it seems like Dobie is working off of a different formula because she feels that red overpowers green. That said, as Leland notes, “This isn’t rocket science, so use your intuition.”

Itten’s formula also assumes that more of a less-powerful color is needed to balance less of a more-powerful color, although as I noted in Color Vibrations (chapter 18) and Less is More, it actually seems like showing less of a color can give it more power in a painting. So in practice it might be useful to reverse these?

Project

I was pretty lost how to approach this project, but I figured I had to start somewhere so I made a thumbnail with some random shapes using violet and yellow.

I started with just the yellow diagonal, but it didn’t seem like enough, so I dropped in the blobs on the lower left to make it feel more balanced.

Does it vibrate? I don’t know. I don’t really have a great sense of what that means anyway. How do I improve it? I don’t know that either.

So I went ahead and developed this one into a representational scene.

I interpreted the diagonal as the sky, in softer shades of violet and yellow, and the yellow blobs as foliage. Then it looked kind of empty, so I added some birds.

I’m still not sure if was doing this right, but it was an interesting and different process for me. I can certainly see the value of starting from a pleasing abstract arrangement. If you’re happy with the shapes and colors in an abstract, then they will probably still look pretty good when they’re developed into a scene. If you jump right into a real-life scene or photographic reference, it’s easy to get lost in detail and only realize later that it doesn’t work on broader level, kind of like writing a novel without an outline.

In fact, I think this is largely what Watercolor Painting by Tom Hoffmann is about.

How I choose to think about the picture can have a profound effect on the way I begin to paint it. In the early stages of a painting I usually want to establish the general structure of the image, without getting caught up in specificity. The painting has to work first of all as an arrangement of big shapes, and at this level it is more important for the pattern of darks and lights to be strong than for any specific information about content to be present. This is why it is important to ask: How long can I stay abstract?

Tom Hoffmann, Watercolor Painting

This process definitely pushed me. The abstract-first process is such an alien way for me to think! It definitely felt like I was doing something random with no way to tell if it was “good” or not. It’s so intuition-based, and I don’t feel like I have strong intuitions. I want some guidelines beyond “do what feels right”.

Rating

Dobie doesn’t generalize her example into a followable process, so I don’t know which parts are supposed to be part of the exercise and which parts are just a for-instance. All of her choices seem to have been made intuitively, so it’s difficult to figure out how to apply them to another situation. There’s nothing else in the chapter, so I was going to give this a failing grade.

But then when I gave it an honest effort and tried going from abstract to representational, I felt that it pushed my comfort zone in a good way. I don’t know how much of that was intentional, but it’s hard to be mad when I learned something.

Rating: D