Focus on: Color/Colour

"The craving for colour is a natural necessity just as for water and fire. Colour is a raw material indispensable to life. At every era of his existence and his history, the human being has associated colour with his joys, his actions and his pleasures."

-- Frenand Leger, "On Monumentality and Color", 1943.

"Circles Series #1"
8'x8'x2'
acrylic, watercolor, colored pencil, ink on wood panel

From the very beginning of mark making and painting for art's sake, artists have shared a common focus on one or more of the following elements: Color, Texture, Shape/Imagery, Line, Movement in a Composition and or playing with the Focal Point of the Composition. Over the course of the next (?) blog posts I hope to shed some light on my personal relationship with those elements and ways that help me focus my inspirations. I hope that they may help you discover new ways to connect with color. Please share your resources and thoughts so we can all benefit!

 The Worcester Art Museum's 'Flora in Winter'  exhibition

     Color has to be my greatest inspiration on a given day and my greatest challenge at times to recreate on my palette. When traveling about in my day-to-day life I am constantly noting color relationships. When I am shopping at the farmer’s market or grocery store in the produce aisle I sometimes find myself stopping just to take in the particular hues of the season. Driving around my Central Massachusetts community seeing red maple leaves against a cerulean-colored sky or the chartreuse leaves of a “weed” growing next to a weathered olive-green barn makes my carpool hours fly.

I glean inspiration from artists’ I admire as well: I admire Klimt’s landscapes, which often feature a dominant color palette with specks of opposite colors to help your eye move around the composition and balance the over-all palette. I have recently gone back to looking at Carl Larson’s interiors for his use of oranges and reds with teals and beiges. Larson's illustrations were a huge influence on me in high school and college when I was focused more on watercolor illustration.

I have been reading Victoria Finlay's book:  Color: A Natural History of the Palette I love a good story and this is a pleasant and informative read for us art-history geeks (and by "geek" I mean the world's most interesting among us, of course).

Websites that feature colorful eye candy that I play around in when searching for inspiration are: 

COLOURlovers.com (here's one of my recent palettes': http://www.colourlovers.com/lover/janemh) 

Google Images is a great place to gain some inspiration from many many unexpected design and image sources. 

detail from "Grateful" commission -
the Cardiac wing of the Boston Children's Hospital

I go to print sources for ideas about color combinations in places like catalogs (I LOVE sundance catalog!), interior design magazines (also great to follow trends in color) and design books like Tricia Guild's books .

Notations of colors I invent (often by accident) go in my sketch books; noting the paint colors I used to get the shade with clear scientific measurements such as "a bit" ...When I do a sketch for a commission I will work with the patron to choose colors from my colored pencil collection and make notations in the margins. 

sketch for "Epiphany I"
2100

I was delighted to hear Nate Burkus announce recently that the colors aqua and asparagus green are the trends right now because I can’t seem to stop using them in my work! I am starting to lean heavily in the direction of orange and saffron however…
Would love to hear your color and palette resources, loves and inspirations! 

-Carry on and take good care! -