Jasper Deane
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colour research
1980–2006
Jasper Deane colour research 1980–2006
Jasper Deane colour research 1980–2006
Published in 2011 at Hereford College of Arts Jasper Deane: colour research 1980–2006 Original Exhibition held in 2006 at www.manandeve.co.uk info@manandeve.co.uk Copyright Š Jasper Deane. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed by Inky Little Fingers Designed by Pippa Sanderson www.pippasanderson.co.uk
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FOUR COLOUR THEORY
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BYZANTINE
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RENAISSANCE
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ALCHEMICAL
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GOETHE
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METAPHYSICAL
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COLOUR COMPOSITION
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
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mixing was also taught, using the Newtonian primary colours (red, yellow and blue) as the starting point for further inter-mixtures that produced the secondary colours (green, orange and purple). This extremely limited and unsubtle introduction to the subject of colour was never questioned, yet a little knowledge of physics showed me that Newton’s colour wheel described the behaviour of light, while the colour mixing chart derived from it described the additive mixture of pigments. Most young artists are far too interested in expressing themselves without wanting to be disturbed by textbook information. Painters, in particular, quickly recognise the ineffectiveness of formulae in informing their work. Most proceed to abandon any scientific or rational attempts to mix colour in favour of self expression and experiment. This was the path that I took for many years. However, I developed an interest in tradition and, through persistent study of art from Polygnotos to Juan Gris, I began to discern that colour could be used in a systematic and meaningful way that
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INTRODUCTION
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began my research into colour and its relationship to form in response to a feeling of dissatisfaction with what I had been taught about colour at art school. The received orthodoxy consisted of Newton’s colour wheel, or a simplified version of it, that emphasised complementary colours: adjacent colours on the wheel were considered harmonies, and opposite colours were considered complementary, although the functionality of these opposites was never explained. A system of colour
appeared theoretical and not the product of mere ‘self expression’. Thus began my interest in the relationships between colour and form that I perceived to lie beneath the composition and method of the artists that I admired. I was not satisfied with imitating, in a mimetic way, prior art, but was ultimately trying to find for myself a convincing formal use of colour that had previously eluded me. To this end, I undertook to research colour theory and instruction in the preNewtonian period, and to put my findings into practice. I began reading books about colour theory, looking to artists and philosophers including Heraclitus, Aristotle, Polygnotos, Theophilus and Da Vinci; and to later writers including Goethe and Steiner, as my tutors. I soon discovered there were other points of view about the basic colours, which were in opposition to Newtonian orthodoxy. It was not my intention to make a piece of academic scholarship. Had this been the case, I would certainly have needed to include modern colour theorists of importance: Itten at the Bauhaus, and the influence of the chemist Ostwald on Paul Klee to name but two. The sketches and paintings in this show were made as private study to help me in developing and understanding my own painting practice.
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The results were to prove very exciting and useful and to suggest significant new points of departure for pictorial form and expression, but I hope the works themselves afford some interest and pleasure. I feel they do have an aesthetic value of their own, perhaps evolving from the searching intention that motivated them. My thanks to Lucy Newman Cleeve for bringing this work to light and to Lydia Parva for her helpful suggestions. Jasper Deane (2006 and 2011)
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began searching for a more lucid approach to colour, which also worked on a formal level. I began by looking at the ‘four colour’ method of the ancient world, as described by Pliny in Natural History. I limited my palette to the use of the coloures austerii: red ochre, yellow ochre, vine black and white, colours which were used by the Ancients to paint serious subjects such as
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FOUR COLOUR THEORY
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t the beginning of my career as a painter, I attempted to make compositions using oppositions of complementary colours. I soon realised this was not a viable way to produce satisfactory compositions and that there was a problem with the Newtonian mode of description in relation to my attempts to paint. I
battle scenes or religious pictures. I tried to mix these pigments myself and was surprised that it produced such an articulate palette. I was able to represent appearances very well without the use of other colours, for example, the ‘blue’ black of vine black substituting well for blue when mixed with white to the appropriate value. I was even able to reproduce the natural spectrum of colours, using only four colours. The limitation of the palette enforced a unity on the work and the use of this palette by the Ancients for serious subjects could easily be understood. I began to recognise the use of the four colour method in surviving ancient paintings and in reproductions of mosaics that had been closely based on ancient paintings; for example, the famous Nilotic Mosaic at Palestrina, and the many works found at Pompeii and Herculanium, as well as the portraits from Fayoum discovered by Flinders Petrie. In some cases the coloures austerii were used in conjunction with the coloures floridii, a brighter range of pigments employed for
less serious subjects. These lesspermanent colours were derived from vegetable dye and included indigo, cerulean, artificial vermillion and dragon’s blood (a vegetable red). Such combinations can be seen in classical mosaics and in Pompeian paintings of various periods. I began to see that quite a lot of contemporary art has obviously
been interested in the same phenomenon. The cubist painters, particularly Juan Gris and early Braque, made use of the four colour palette, and the classical motifs in early cubist paintings suggest that this was a conscious decision. Our view of things today is impressionistic – the way we conceive of colour and light claims to be naturalistic and is based in the Newtonian mode of description. In the ancient world, colour was considered to be a property of physical objects, rather than an optical phenomenon. The change in art that followed from the emphasis on complementary colours and the effect of light on colour diminished the formal values of painting. Juan Gris employed techniques similar to those I was examining, his intention being to return to painting the classical values that had been dispersed by impressionism.
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During this period, I started to make the connections in my thinking between the use of the colours as relating to the elements. Writing in De Coloribus, Aristotle relates the various colour groups to the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. This alerted me to the fact that this ‘mode of description’, which also occurs in classical medicine and literature, was one of the unifying principles behind the composition, construction and colouring of ancient paintings. In a more general analysis, I considered the mode of description that was used by the ancients, the mytheopeic vision of classical art. This can be described as an I:Thou relationship to qualities and phenomenon in nature, or to the gods. I began to speculate as to whether this general mode of description might give some clue as to the relationships between the four colours and the elements, and about whether they were participating in the qualities of one another, or transforming one another. I studied a number of paintings from the period and concluded that cool red, black and white were consistently
used to represent human beings, and it would seem that human beings are the most spiritual element of the pictures. At the same time, the air element also seemed to describe the spiritual content of the picture, and I found a colour group that related to air, which suggested that colour had a symbolic or allegorical function within the ancient world. I wrote to the British Museum about my findings but they responded that the use of colour in classical art was entirely decorative. This contradicted what I had perceived and what I had read in Aristotle as well.
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It seemed to me that the use of colour was highly symbolic, to the extent that it was a whole language of elemental relationships, being used consistently. This discovery ties in with later classical painting, certainly with quite a lot of the work of Poussin in the 17th century. I carried out further inconclusive experiments, trying to relate the four colours to the different modes of music. There are several modal arrangements of the harmonic series in Greek music, and Poussin mentions these modes being applied to classical art. I also experimented with the encaustic technique, a process of painting with pigment that has been combined with wax. This invention is attributed to Polygnotos of Thassos and is described in Pliny’s Natural History in relation to painting the hulls of boats. The ancient Greeks used a mixture of wax and oil as a medium for painting
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sailing boats, partly to make them go faster and partly to decorate them. This process, said to have developed into representational art and the oil painting we know today, was difficult and time consuming, but produced many unique and pleasing effects. It also reminded me that painting has always had its origins in craft. My research into the four colour approach left me impressed by the levels of craftsmanship and the degree of abstraction practiced by the Ancients. The ancient goals of art seem to have been to achieve balance between the elements, symmetry and poise. They regarded painting as a technei, or a ‘philosophical craft’ and, to this extent, I found a certain amount of connection with what I’d been researching, in that I was reading philosophers like Aristotle and getting my information about painting from them. I was interested that painting obviously had a very integrated role in the philosophical art of the Ancients, and that the craft side of ancient painting was also integrated with the philosophical side.
Obviously, big divisions have since occurred, possibly from the 18th century onwards. Artists today are still living in the wash of Romanticism. In the ancient world, ethics and aesthetics were considered to be the basis of society and of all civilisation, yet contemporary artists have divorced ethics and aesthetics from each other. In reality there are no aesthetics without ethics and no ethics without aesthetics – they are completely complementary. Whether the precise mode of description I discovered in classicism is still valid, I am not sure – my interest is not in classical revivals per se, which often relate to political concerns I do not share. Classicism intrigues me because of its integrity more than anything else.
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hair and beards of old men to robes on a ceiling panel. They are all based in the manipulation of tonal scales and colours of high chroma, produced pleasing results in which the traditional religious colour schemes of the period can clearly be recognised. These experiments provided me with no clear conclusions about whether the Byzantine period had preserved the best of Greek art, or developed in its own manner. If there was a relationship between the Byzantine period and the classical world, it was embellished to such an extent that it became something else. A decadence had crept in and the use of colour was much more complex.
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BYZANTINE
became curious as to whether any of the knowledge of classical painting had survived into the Byzantine era. I was aware that the Byzantine period retained a lot of classical knowledge, in spite of the fact that a lot of the books of the classical period had not survived. I began to look at the work of Byzantine monks to see if any of this knowledge had crept into the monasteries; and I came across the writings of a monk called Theophilus, including his book Upon Diverse Arts (c 1125). This practical text provides detailed instruction about all the crafts and arts that would have been necessary for building cathedrals. It also includes a chapter on colour and painting, in which Theophilus writes extensively about colour relationships. I proceeded to make practical experiments based on his instructions about how to mix colour and how to make relationships between them, even learning to grind my own paint in order to do this. Theophilus’ injunctions are very prescriptive, suggesting the pigments that should be used for representing everything from the
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is no matter of any density there, which the rays of the sun must penetrate, and in consequence illuminate. If you wish briefly to see all the varieties of composed colours, take panes of coloured glass and look through them at all the colours of the country, which are seen beyond them. Then you will see that the colour of things seen beyond the glasses are all mixed with the colour of the glass and you will see which colour is strengthened or weakened by this mixture. For example, if the glass is yellow, I say that the visual images of objects which pass through that colour to the eye can be impaired of improved, and deterioration will happen to blue, black and white more than to all the others; and improvement will occur with yellow and green more than with other colours. Thus you will examine with the eye the mixture of colours, which are infinite in number: and thus you can make a choice of colours for new combinations of mixed and composed colours. You may do the same with two glasses of different colours held before the eye and thus continue experimenting by yourself.”
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RENAISSANCE
aving found little connection between the Byzantine and Classical periods, and aware that the Renaissance had tried to revive Classical learning, I turned to the famous Renaissance texts written for painters: Course of study for Artists, by Leonardo Da Vinci and Temple of Painting by Lomazzo. I was interested to see how these texts related to my learning about the Classical pallet. I began to put into action the instructions in these books, making many discoveries along the way. In Lomazzo I found much discussion of the ‘humours’ and their relationship to colour and this use could be detected in the works of the period; El Greco for instance. But, what most caught my attention was the passage in Leonardo’s work for painters that suggested the following procedure, which I was to follow and explore for myself. “White shall be put down for light, without which no colour can be seen, yellow for earth, green for water, blue for air, red for fire: for there
This change in colour according to the colour of the light in which it is seen is now known as Metamerism. Metamerism occurs as a natural phenomenon. Throughout the course of the day, the colour of the sunlight changes due to its variable refraction and diffusion through the atmosphere. This affects the appearance of the colour of an object, both in full light and in shadow. I was to apply this system in many different ways in the course of my practical research pieces. I started by examining the basic underpainting colours, familiar from my studies of Cennini, and known as the verdaccios. These consist of a cool green or terre verte and a second yellow-grey colour which is mixed from all four of the element colours: black, yellow ochre, Indian red and white. I looked at these two colours through sunglasses containing red, blue and orange lenses and recorded the colour changes that took place under different filters with sometimes surprising results. I continued experimenting with viewing different colours through
different filters. The image in figure x depicts various metamerisms of the colour yellow. The central circle in the six circles represented the original colour, made progressively warmer in tone from top left to bottom right. The outer circles represent the same colour and its transformations when viewed through blue (inner circle) and green (outer circle) filters. I perceived that when submitting warm colours to a blue filter, unusual colour transformations took place towards the red end of the spectrum and these unusual transformations took place consistently through all my colour experiments. While metamerism produced a fascinating system for me to work with, it still didn’t resolve some of the central objects of my research, which were to find cohesive relationships between colour and form, which related to the elemental mode of description.
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Reading Leonardo’s notebooks, I came across his description of the relationship between the colours and the elements: “The simple colours are six, of which the first is white. Although some philosophers do not accept white or black in the number of colours because one is the cause of colours and one is the absence of them, yet because painters cannot do without them, we include them in their number, and say that in this order, white is the first among the simple, and yellow is second, green is third, blue is fourth, red is fifth and black is the sixth. White we shall put down for the light, without which no colour can be seen. Yellow for the earth, green for the water, blue for the air, red for fire and black for the darkness’s that are above the element of fire. For there is no matter of any density there which the rays of the sun must penetrate and in consequence, illuminate.” I reproduced the six colours and started experimenting with different formal relationships between them, but it was Heraclitus’ theory of the Circulation of the Elements that helped me to organise these things. Reading Heraclitus showed me that the elements were not a static system, but that there was a constant
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interchange between them. This idea became the basis of my attempts to reconstruct the relationship between colours and the ‘cycle of the elements’, a concept that seems to have been interpreted literally by the 18th century painter Turner and, to some extent, by Goethe. I started experimenting with different arrangements of the colour circle, grouping the colours into four sections for each element. This was the only way I could create a series of transpositions where one colour from one group would move over to another. I ended up with the colours relating to the earth element being orange, yellow, blue and green; the colours relating to the air element being blue, black, white and cool red; the colours relating to the fire element being mauve, yellow, pale orange and a pale red; and the colours relating to the water element being green, blue, black and purple. According to these groupings, I could create a consistent circular system which allowed for the transposition of one colour from one group or element to another.
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ALCHEMICAL
ursuit of this idea of the circulation of the elements led me to esoteric traditions such as alchemy, where I found descriptions of colour correspondence between the elements and the colours similar to those I had deduced. Leonardo had mentioned various alchemical modes of description and the concept of the circulation of the elements and transformation is also present in alchemical writing.
I studied a few alchemical texts, including the works of Robert Fludd, reproduced some of his colour wheels and concluded that the way colour was used in alchemy was principally to describe changes in the state of matter, but there were also general stages within the alchemical work, which were described by colour. The goal of the alchemist was to transmute base metal into gold and there’s a phase within this process which is called negredo, which describes the blackening of the substance.
There’s also a phase which is called rubrido, which describes the reddening of the substance. The final phase within the alchemical process is the whitening of the substance. So the progress through the work towards transformation of the base metal into gold was characterised by changes of colour and, interestingly, these were the same as the four colours of the classical palette. The mode of description employed, however, was strictly Aristotelian, which led me to one of the enigmas encountered in my research.
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Newton was a practising alchemist and, since he reviewed almost all known books on the subject, he must have been aware of the elemental mode of description which was then applied to the use of colour. His own description in optics, however, is rationalistic and empirical. That he held both descriptions to be true is the only conclusion that seems logical.
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black dot is viewed through a prism, colour fringes appear around the edge – an orange fringe appears on one side and a blue/green fringe appears on the opposite side. I reproduced some of Goethe’s experiments and recorded my results in watercolour as was the method he used himself. The results were startling and beautiful. Obviously an emotive colour prone to be loaded with symbolic association, black most often symbolises the ‘universal feminine’ and the censored parts of the human mind, so it is not surprising that problems should gather around it. The painter chooses to use the pigment black or not according to his intention: blue was often seen by the 19th century naturalists to be a truer alternative in their attempts to represent light; however, research has shown me that most painters employed black as a means of adjustment of colour value.
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GOETHE
proceeded to the work of the 18th century German poet and scientist, Goethe, who considered his work on colour theory to be his greatest achievement. Goethe was also an alchemist but was angrily opposed to Newton, one of the principal differences between the two men being their description of the colour black. For Goethe, black was “the origin of all colours”, while for Newton, black was “the absence of light”. “Newton created white from all colours, he’s even fooled you, so that you will believe in a secular world,” Goethe is supposed to have said. Clearly different modes of description are at work in these two definitions. Goethe’s description of black almost certainly has its origin in ancient Greece and may even be an alchemical tenet. Newton’s, however, is based in his study of optics and is a seemingly more rationalistic explanation. Goethe had attempted, through his experiments with colour fringes seen through prisms, to justify his description of the colour black as the origin of all colours. When a
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the relationships between colour and matter, which had been central to Goethe. Steiner’s use of colour in healing and therapy extended to his approach to children, and the use of a colourful environment and colourful clothing. Steiner’s work influenced subjective approaches to colour by 20th century artists, such as the Bauhaus group, and has influenced our generally held subjective views about colour today, ie that everyone sees colour subjectively. I’m exploring the question of whether there are more objective approaches than our contemporary approach might suggest.
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METAPHYSICAL
moved on to look at other 18th century colour methodologies again making practical experiments with them. I looked at the portrait painter Le Blon and his mixtures and methods, at Richard Wilson’s Palette as described by Paul Sandby; then, moving on to the 20th century, read the colour ideas of the Theosophist and teacher Rudolf Stiener, who’s works had been based in Goethe’s theory, and in Maur’s The Sound of Painting; I considered the many attempts by artists to form syntheses between colour systems and music. These led me to speculate about the nature of colour and led me to Rudolph Steiner’s ideas, that were directly influenced by Goethe. Rudolph Steiner has a philosophical programme that he related to colour relationships and that programme was central to his theosophical beliefs and also to his work with colour and colour therapy. In Steiner, colours are used to describe the inner, spiritual life of the human being and inner transformations within the human soul and psyche. He also describes
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COLOUR COMPOSITION
aving explored all these different ways of using colour, I started to integrate these various modes of description within a series of creative compositions. Almost as a cubist might have moved from being an analytical cubist to a synthetic cubist, I was trying to reintegrate the analytical work into a more natural way of creating and making paintings. At this juncture, I started to enjoy myself again. My own conclusions about the relationship of colour to form, and indeed, my conclusions about the nature of painting, have been richly informed by this practical research. They are also indebted to the contemporary writings of the psychotherapist Norberto Keppe, who teaches that the origin of human illness lies in the rejection of consciousness. I began this research because I sensed a problem with the Newtonian mode of description of colour. I came to realise that the problems with this system were actually psychological. Because colour brings us consciousness of inner sensation or connection with the eye, it also brings us consciousness of our denial of consciousness and our pathology.
Acceptance of colour is acceptance of consciousness; rejection of colour sets us in opposition to consciousness. Newton attempted to rationalise colour, which had previously been considered to be a more holistic phenomenon. In doing so, he was opposing consciousness, through his failure to consider aesthetics. Steiner restated this fact, albeit within a very complex system. He recognised that colour affects us psychologically at a very deep level and brings us awareness of our opposition to consciousness – this being the central malaise of the human being. My study of clas‑sical art showed me that art as pure action is something which is all good. As with colour, pure action brings connection with the human essence. There could not be conceptual art in ancient Greece, because art was philosophy. In the same way, alchemy is an integrated philosophical and technical procedure, with a philosophical goal. Obviously the quest to transform base metal into gold is no longer a serious aspiration, but the philosophical goal
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of humanitas, which was also the goal of medieval education, is still relevant. I feel certain that humanitas or ‘knowledge of the heart’, was the real gold of the alchemists, and that this is the same thing as acceptance of consciousness. This was perhaps the true goal of my quest to determine a formal relationship between colour and form.
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