Article Preview
TopCan We Talk About Color?
Juan Carlos Sanz points out in The Color Book that we should take care in the way in which we make comments about color and identify concepts, and that “Only in this way will we avoid the confusing concept and the empty word. Because when we talk about color, we talk about what we see1” (Sanz, 1993, p.10). Associating words with colors, the coupling of concepts and perceptions refers to what we see, this subjective impression, derived from attentive observation, urges and inspires us to paint and has given rise to beautiful pages of written text and the paintings of great artists. Leonardo da Vinci continually refers to his visual experiences, like when he alludes to the color of the sky and the different shades of color seen at a distance from the highest peaks of the Alps. (Leonardo, 1980, p.333). The writings of Eugene Delacroix are also full of revealing moments that occurred during his walks, when he recognizes complementary contrasts and marvels at the hue of the shadows at different times of the day. His diary entry, written on November 13, 1850, reads: “It was sunset; the chrome and lake tones were most brilliant on the side where it was light and the shadows were extraordinary blue and cold “(Ives & Barker, 2000, p.94).
Every artist, when they look at something, receives a different stimulus, each chromatic impression arouses a different response, and each painter reflects a unique experience in the paintings and in the writings. By reading these reflections on colors, we can better understand the differences in the choice of pictorial languages, which, although diverse, do not contradict each other because they complement each other and advance along their own exploratory path. Matisse, for example, in his Notes of a Painter explains the decisions he makes about color by giving reason to this singularity to verify his own experience: “My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility”. Matisse continues the phrase by contrasting his experience with color with that of other painters, precisely in line with the words we have previously mentioned from Delacroix: “Inspired by certain pages of Delacroix, an artist like Signac is preoccupied with complementary colors, and the theoretical knowledge of them will lead him to use a certain tone in a certain place. But I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation”(Matisse, 1908, p.41).
But if there is an artist who has gone even further in the association between color and sensation that artist is Kandinsky who in On the Spiritual in Art goes deeper into the observation of color, and in the attempt to understand his (its own) language provides examples as graphic as this: “The absolute green in the realm of color can be compared to the so-called bourgeoisie; it is an immovable, self-satisfied element, limited in every sense and, in many ways, resembling a fat, healthy, immovably resting cow, capable only of eternal rumination, while dull bovine eyes gaze forth vacantly into the world”. (Kandinsky, 1946: pp 65-66).
All of these painters’ writings are proof of the enormous effort required to transmit, using words, the complexity of the phenomenon of color and its effect on the artists’ emotion and sensitivity. A decisive descriptive effort for the in-depth understanding of the structure of colors; although, when we talk about green, what green are we exactly referring to? The desire to identify the color and describe it equates to internalizing the color and making it suitable and relatable to other things. But in the attempt to capture color using words, we confirm both the ineffability of our experience with color and the impulse to look for other words, better descriptions and more accurate expressions. Restricting the description of color would give the impression of dominating it (not subjecting it), of exerting a specific type of control, taming color in some way.