Color and relationships

 One of the great side effects of a long project involving fiber in various different stages of its existence is the consideration of color and its relation to other colors.  This combed top is in a color I truly don't like at all.  It's flattered by the camera, but in real life it's a lot deader and gloomier than here.

However, as you know, color is not an absolute.  It creates quite different perception in the viewer according to what's next to it.  There's a music in colors, where they change one another.  That's why that paint sample in the store looks really different on your own wall at home, in relation to your other colors and furniture.

If you ever get the chance to see this book, here's a pic of the front cover of a cheap paperback version of Josef Albers classic Interaction of Color, you'll really get a lot out of it.  If you're a stitcher or a knitter or a spinner or a weaver or a painter, you'll get such depth of knowledge from studying it even briefly.  You might be able to find it cheaply second hand.

His point is that colors appear to change depending on their nearest neighbors.  See those two little squares, how different they look?  next to different colors. They're exactly the same colors if you observe them by coordinates, hue, luminosity, and so on, never mind the technicalities. But you see how they change to the eye? Even in this inaccurate medium with a mediocre camera and a mediocre paperback image, you can clearly see it.

You can take advantage of this fact by putting a color you don't like along with a different one and observing the resulting effect.  Here I plied the color I don't like with a warm dark reddish brown yarn single, and it made a lovely warm inviting tweedy effect, just by twining alongside a different color.

 

Transformed.  And ready to work nicely with other colors as we proceed.  Here's the left front up to now, and the two woven pockets ready to take their places eventually, wherever they work best.  See how that new yarnball is warming up the whole area around it?

 

One of the best art teachers I ever had used to set the task of choosing a color you don't like then incorporating it into a painting in such a way that you could enjoy seeing it.

Sometimes it's not about what the artist wants.  It's about what the artwork wants.  That's always a surprising statement when you make it to a young artist, as I have, when he said well I would always avoid colors I don't like anyway.  He agreed to think about it, anyway, after he got over his surprise at learning that the artist is only the conduit, not the boss, of the art!

And in winter we all experience the sight of snowflakes looking dark grey as they fall down against the sky, then suddenly white when they pass the dark colors of the buildings on the way to the ground.  Same phenomenon at work.

All that said, I expect you realize at this point just how much thinking and considering is going into this jacket I'm making.  Nothing is random, or guesswork.  Many, many decision points, all very satisfying and joyful. No hurry. What the work needs, it will get.

 

This is one reason we should fight to keep art in our schools as a regular offering.  It's about learning to see and decide and weigh options, and go for it. Always a good set of skills for anyone, at any age!  Now I'll get off my hobbyhorse and go back to knitting..

 

Five Reasons I'm Full of Hope!

These are the teens who signed up as volunteers to come and learn to make paper jewelry in preparation for assisting me at the summer paper jewelry program I'm teaching at the local library.

They showed up cheerful, friendly, on time, ready to work, ready to listen, rapid learners all, and this is why my town looks to me to be in good hands!   

Each of them will help supervise one table of youngsters age 7 and up, to have a wonderful time making bead bracelets from practically nothing!  

The theme is local color, and the aspect I'm looking at without explaining it in some many words, is the way color changes dramatically depending on what color is next to it. 

So as they make the beads, they get the visual interest of seeing how the paper transforms as they turn it -- the volunteers were very amused when this happened to them!-- and when they string them, they get to choose the colors and order of stringing.  

Everyone will get a plain colored sheet, and a magazine sheet with brilliant colors, and a piece of kraft brown paper (this makes beads which look like wood).  So they'll have choices and as they pick, they'll have the experience of the interaction of color. As well as the experience of turning scrap paper into a thing of beauty to wear.

Josef Albers would be proud!  this understanding of the interaction of color was his lifelong work.  If you're interested in knowing more go here  

I went to the major show at the Guggenheim years ago, to spend hours being transported by his Homage to the Square studies, and have never forgotten them.  They were many many tests of the relationships of colors painted inside the bounded field of a square,  with squares within the painting.  What it showed was stunningly deep and significant in the understanding of the properties of color.And since Maggi Johnson, one of my own mentors, was one of the luminaries he taught at Black Mountain College many years ago, I have a special interest.

Albers was the forerunner of the color field painters who came later and was a huge influence on American art of the twentieth century, where color was accepted as having meaning aside from the relationships and shapes into which it was formed. Rothko, Clyfford Still, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and a lot of other major artists owe a lot to his insights.
 
Back to the local program: I really like the time bomb aspect of teaching -- where you present, without naming them, important aspects of making and understanding art, and it may be years before your students really get in words what you said. even while they're executing it in art. 

Then, when it's presented to them years later, using the actual terminology, they realize, oh, I know this!  but they've been influenced by it all along.  This works for adults as well as kids, and I mainly teach adults, who can build on a lifetime of knowledge and experience and add to it and analyze it through their art and generally expand their lives.

It's not just a fun little time!