“I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.” - Joan Miro

Wish I had thought of saying that! I have always felt that art is visual music, and colour is the melody.

How do artists treat colour? Artists are people who have the ability to perceive more colours than the average person can. But anybody can be an artist. Even you, who spends valuable time reading hubs on colour, for heaven’s sake!

Let’s start using these cool tools of artists; let’s start by making you one:

Try this simple experiment. Choose a piece of grey: slab of concrete, silver pendant, patch of cloudy sky, backside of a zebra, mother-in-law’s hair, anything. Now write down the colours you see there. Really! There’s no pure grey in nature, or any other pure colour, for that matter. You will notice brown, yellow, blue and green in your piece of grey. Next you may take a piece of green and note the different shades in it. Study a pair of your black trousers, or black skirt, if female, or cross-dressing male. Black fabric is usually brown-black or blue-black; sometimes it is green-black. Dip the point of a black sketch pen in a drop of water and you can see if the ink is a brown-based black or blue-based black.

I had an arty friend, philosopher and guru who always mixed a percent of green into his black, when he did monochromatic pictures. This gave him subtler shades.

When I was a babe in the woods of art, I had a good drawing master. He used to come round our desks, peering silently over our shoulders while we drew and painted. One watercoloury day, I was painting a portrait of a boy at a window. I used a mixture of Burnt Sienna and Crimson in Ivory White to get a satisfactory flesh colour. My strong and silent master suddenly took some Sky Blue and dabbed it on my boy’s face! If any of my classmates had done that, I would have drowned him in Sky Blue and painted his corpse Vermillion. But Sir was Sir and I stared at the ruins of my masterpiece in dismay. As I stared, I suddenly understood what he had done. Insight time! The blue somehow made the light from the window real; it bathed the boy’s cheek in blue light. This was my first practical lesson in seeing colour.

“The surface of every opaque body assumes the hues reflected from surrounding objects.” – Leonardo Da Vinci.

Bad photographers don’t allot for the reflection of colours around the subject being shot. The photographer’s art, therefore, also lies in not capturing realism. In a green room, the ambient light has an overdose of that hue and can give even Miss Universe a green pallour, making her look like she forgot to shave that morning. Photographers don’t shoot in fluorescent tube lights. Everything goes green. A painter would splash blue and green on portraits; as if he would be booted out of the Art Club if he does only brown. Like a superhero is a hero who wears his undies over his tights, an artist is someone who paints blue when he’s supposed to paint brown and paints green when he’s supposed to do violet. BTW, green and violet will lend substance to your blacks and will also give you a good colour to do the underside of fish and bellies of worms.

Where are the 16 million colours they claim exist in your computer monitor? You only know the difference when you compare it with a resolution of fewer colours. The RGB of computer colour is Red, Blue and Green and usually you have 255 values for each colour. 255 cubed or 255 X 255 X 255 gives 16581375, more than 16 million colour values for your pix. Nature has infinite colour values, which means the more values you have in your pic, the closer it will get to real life.

Traditional painters use the concept of ‘aerial perspective’ when portraying depth. And aerial p uses colour for its effects. In landscapes, the more distant an object is, the more it takes on the colour of the background. Mountains are blue against a blue sky; they are yellower or redder at sunset. The farther a tree is, the bluer it is painted. Objects also lose their sharpness, and the contrast between light and shade as they recede. For fun, study the landscape behind the Mona Lisa of Da Vinci.

" Paint your high lights white; place next to it yellow, then red, using darker red as it passes into the shadow; then with a brush filled with cool gray pass gently over the whole, until they are tempered and sweetened to the tone you wish." Rubens, describing how to mix colours for painting flesh. And I once thought we just have to mix flesh colour using red, brown and white and apply it to canvas!

Painters are skillful at knowing how colour changes personality in the company of other colours and how a colour can have subtle variations within the object coloured, rendering it richer and giving it character.

“When we compare Titian with other colourists, we find in his tones a greater truth and sweetness, his deepest brown shadows never appear black, his reds have a less harsh appearance from their being less positive, his green colours less violent, possessing more tone either of a brown or gray hue, and his deepest blues truer to the colouring of nature in extreme distances, or in the deep blue of the sky, or in distant sea.” – Sir Joshua Reynolds on Titian.

Modern Art is not very modern; it was born in the nineteenth century. One of the reasons for the birth of MA was the invention of photography. The i of p removed the neccessity of imitating or recording nature. Pictures were recorded in a fraction of the skill needed to paint one. Science was one-up on Art and Art had to make a comeback. In 1870, a band of young painters, gave traditional oil painting a black eye by ignoring its approaches and conducting bold experiments with light and colour. Its adherents used spots, squiggles and dabs of pure colour to capture the essence of light, and gave new definitions to colour.

Claude Monet’s painting, “Impression: A Sunrise” gave the name ‘Impressionism’ to this school of early Modern Art.

To better understand the concept, try this Impressionist experiment for yourself. Draw something simple, like an apple, using sketch pens. Use only dots and dashes of red, blue and yellow. If you want orange, dots of red and dashes of yellow close to each other. For green, yellow and…but you already know this from kindergarten or early hubs of thisseries on colour, so get on!

If you want to ape the Impressionists even more, use violet and blue only for shadows; black was poison to most of them. View your finished masterpiece from a distance and you will see a vibrant apple, pulsating in living light. If you had painted an apple, that is. Painted this way, colours optically mix, as in real life, and light becomes more of an entity.

“Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” - Claude Monet.

Take a dekko at his original paintings to learn more, if you have the time and money; look through the web if you have little time and money. Also works by Pissaro, Renoir and Degas. Another painter, Seurat carried this concept farther to invent ‘Pointillism,’ painting perfect circles of pure colour at regular spaces. Impressionism gave way to Post-impressionism, which retained some of their concepts and added new ones. Cezanne, Gaugin, Van Gogh.

Vincent Van Gogh, (1853-90) used a bright palette to create dramatic renderings of mundane subjects. Oil painting is a slow medium, the more turpentine or linseed oil or whatever you mix with your oil paint, the longer it takes to dry. Painters usually work on many canvases at a time, each at a different state of progress. That’s how traditionalists paint in oils. Van Gogh used ‘impasto;’ the technique for painters in a hurry; he painted colours straight out of the tube, using thick, visible brushstrokes, averaging one painting a day towards the end of his life. His canvases transport you to his presence; canvases that take on the quality of fluid arts like dance and music; spontaneity recorded till eternity.

VG was inspired by Japanese prints and started by painting thick dark outlines. He then filled these areas in, juxtaposing bright complementary colours. A colour will increase the brightness and hue of its complementary if they are placed side by side.

"To exaggerate the fairness of hair, I come even to orange tones, chromes and pale yellow ... I make a plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background, I get a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky." – Van Gogh.

In 1905, greatly influenced by the likes of Van Gogh, a group of painters, Henri Matisse at their head, outraged the art world by exhibiting works of brilliant colour. These artists were dubbed ‘the wild beasts’ or ‘Les Fauves’ and that art movement came to known as Fauvism. These artists paid secondary importance to the subject of their paintings and primary importance to colour power. For example, you wouldn’t learn anything about a horse from a painting of a horse; the horse would just be a titular excuse for the composition of colour.

In Matisse’s words, “The chief aim of colour should be to serve expression as well as possible,” and “… not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.”

Piet Mondriaan (1872-1944), painted abstract compositions of blue, yellow, red, white and black boxes. His influence is still seen in ads and packaging. Ignorant folks who make funny jokes about Modern Art should see his paintings, be moved by the beauty of pure colour and be silent.