The Colour Attributes of Paintings

Abstract

In order to understand a phenomenon, one must be able to navigate it: to name its parts and to know its up from its down. Colour is a great challenge in this respect, being dimensionally very complex. This chapter examines the ways in which colour is understood in the visual art domain. Of particular focus is contrast and the many forms that it takes. Firstly, we examine RYB, HSL and other colour spaces and describe the role that they played in our work. We also detail the work of Johannes Itten (1888-1967) whose writings on colour contrast informed a lot of our research. A painter’s colour-thinking is high-level, addressing the structure-based contrast properties of a painting. This structure takes many forms: per region, per object, as a whole across the entire painting, between regions and objects, etc. These we describe and exemplify. We also address the role that they played in our research. The so-called colour harmony describes as high-level principles the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ colour contrasts. We detail historical and contemporary ideas on the subject, much of which has its roots in the work of early twentieth-century mystics. Using this work as a starting point, and the work of the Impressionist painters as reference, we offer our own simple rules of hue harmony.