Colorito is the term coined during the Renaissance to describe painting in which color dominates, and is used for sensual expressive purposes.
The greatest example of colorito in Renaissance painting was Titian.
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| Titian, Euopa and the Bull |
Titian's innovation with color may have been the result of innate talent... or perhaps it was the fluke of where he lived.
Titian happened to live in Venice when it was the center of pigment trade in Italy. Venice was a port city in the Byzantine empire, a city of colors and spices, where commerce brought all the richest colors necessary for creating sumptuous effects. Titian made full use of them. Not only that, but the reflected light from the city's rippling waterways created an effect on colors very different from the light in other places. If Titian had been born 120 miles away in Florence, where rival painters championed Disegno (drawing or design) over colorito, his art would probably have developed very differently. In Florence artists painted frescoes on plaster, but frescoes would not survive for long in the waterways of Venice. Titian achieved his color effects with oil glazes.
Centuries later, Howard Pyle worked as an illustrator in the colorless world of 19th century illustration. He labored over hundreds of black and white illustrations, often reproduced as wood engravings. But by the end of the 19th century, new technologies appeared on the horizon, holding out the promise of accurate full color reproduction.
Christine Podmaniczky, associate curator at the BrandywineMuseum wrote,
in its earliest stages, four-color printing had several drawbacks. The new process required special ink-receptive paper that could be printed on one side only. it also required exact registration of the four plates. Certain colors...were difficult to duplicate with...inks available at the time....Nevertheless, by 1903, Howard Pyle confidently instructed his students to develop their skills in color painting because cost-effective and accurate color reproduction would soon dominate the printing industry.
Pyle had the vision to recognize the opportunities of that time in history. Like a prisoner released from a long internment, he began painting pictures that exploded with color unprecedented in published illustrations.
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| Pyle, the Buccaneer, 1905 |
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| Pyle, Attack on a Galleon |
In the 1950s, graphic designer Bob Peak looked like he was on a path to an unremarkable career as a bland commercial artist.
Then scientists developed a new set of brilliant colors, which dropped a whole new toolbox in his lap. Simultaneously, 1960s social changes created a huge new market for pictures with intense, bold colors.
As a sort of symmetric case, I bring Sebastião Salgado, the Brazilian photographer. When asked why he took mainly black and white photos, he said that all his childhood as the son of a rancher was monochromatic, in shades of green and brown. So that's how he saw the world (he even said that strong colors in photography disturbed him)
ReplyDeleteComparing the painting of Titian and those of Howard Pyle to the Bob Peak pictures demonstrates loud and clear that chromatic poetry has nothing whatever to do with colour saturation. The Peak illustrations imaged here are little more than tinted monochromes, and the one of Kirk and Spock, apart from its lousily sloppy drawing, is particularly so. It's all just amplification substituting for for real substance, like the adding of chorus filters so beloved of certain amateur guitarists even while practicing.
ReplyDeletexopxe-- I think Salgado is the most powerful photographer working today. Many years ago on this blog I inadvertently got into a major brawl when I cited Salgado's work for its artistic excellence and relevance. My audience of painters thought I'd joined the Church of Satan.
ReplyDeletechris bennett-- My thought is that these milestones in the use of color may not be the result of the artist's biological vision, or of some linear artistic evolution, so much as the result of external catalysts that changed the landscape for artists who were receptive to them. I've never been very impressed with Peak's draftsmanship, yet there's no denying that his use of color transformed the 60s. In this way, he's a latter day warrior in the colorito / disegno feud of the Renaissance.
Those little op art pinwheels on the cover of TV Guide may seem corny to us now, but they were once unprecedented. (Peter Max seized on them and made himself a millionaire. Comic artist Jim Steranko couldn't draw worth a damn but he developed a huge following by creating super stylish pages with similar optical and psychedelic graphic devices.) Similarly, today we may see nothing violent about pitting purple against orange against pink in paintings, but in the 1960s Peak blew up the color wheel that other illustrators had been slavishly studying for a century. He was a rock star of illustration. Was this because he had some brilliant original vision about the role color might play? Or was it because he happened to be standing right there when the chemistry of color changed, and a nation weaned on Rockwell was impatient for a change? I suspect it was a little of both.
David,
ReplyDeleteYes, I think that's a fair point. And there is an argument concerning the disegno side of the 60's that the small format and monochromatic nature of early television resulted in the need for bold, easily read patterning in the design field.
This may have been a contributor, but I think it highly unlikely to have been the cause. Architecture had been going this way since the 1900s and fashion in dress and furnishings was by then already shedding much of its centuries long predilection for ornamentation.
Now here's the thing: I think this applies equally to colour if one understands colour as the intrinsic form of ornamentation. The meaning of ornamentation can be thought of as an expression of fluidity upon the surface of structure. The flood waters surrounding dry land to put it in biblical terms, or the essential marriage between order and chaos, the wetness that nourishes the tree to bring about its fruitfulness. Something like that.
So, in terms of your colorito / disegno feud, what I think we see in the modern era is a polarising, a separating of the marriage between ornament / structure. In other words they have been drifting apart and lessening their ability to combine in a meaningful, that's to say fruitful, way.
With this in mind, take another look at what's happening with the three artists you have given us here...
David, I can imagine, you were finding value in stealing the soul of humanity through the mechanical sorcery of pinholes and cameras obscuras.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, when we look back we tend to see only the path that leads to us, but we miss most of the potential that competed against it. If we were standing back then, when the new tool appeared, we would see a lot of people randomly shooting their feet and whacking their fingers, and all of them would've seemed equally valid -or invalid-. And it is very hard for us to see what could have been had the random chance of popularity hit slightly askew.
Orson Welles said he preferred black and white film stock and movies because color film looked like bad "trick work" to him. He said it caused actors to look like they were made of baloney.
ReplyDeleteSome of Peak's Fechin-influenced drawings from the 1970s show him to be, at least in my opinion, one of the very best draftsmen of his generation. The Missouri Breaks poster, for instance, or his images of Native Americans/American Indians. I think he was a hell of a talent when he backed down the ostentatious trickery; not just the day-glo coloring, but also the scribbly surface expressionism and the cheesy airbrush effects that began with his Rollerball poster. Flamboyance is always a tell of hollowness.
Color is not mere ornamentation added to a picture. It's at the heart.
ReplyDeleteJSL
JSL,
ReplyDeleteIf you are going to respond to something I've written please make the effort to try and understand what is actually being said in all its nuance. Then push back on me by all means, which I welcome because I may be wrong about something, but just throwing out unqualified assertions isn't going to help anyone.
Colour, by its very nature, like the implied wayward fancy of ornamentation, is, on its own, formless, which is the essence of its particular appeal to our senses. A sense of falling into blissful, intoxication let's say. Structure, on the other hand, is control, and as such appeals to our sense of ordered orientation. To have one without the regulatory influence of the other is to break a fundamental union of healthy being. And the breakdown of that essential union can be seen going on right now in our culture. But I digress.
Sorry about the repetition, the formatting here has changed again and wrong-footed me!
ReplyDeleteSomeone who attended a class at the Famous Artists A School with Bob Peak told me a story of how Peak did a drawing from out of his head that was in no way less than his finished work and while doing it in short order was telling the students not to fall in love with their work. He held up the drawing which amazed everyone and then tore it into little pieces and all the students ran up to grab pieces of it off the floor.
ReplyDeletePS:
In the last post, I was not disagreeing with Dean Cornwall or even Flannery O’Connor’s idea that a short story is told with actions and images, not explanations. I was trying to defend language as deeply relational to reality (because it is being divorced from reality in injurious ways) by suggesting that it can reach great depths of the human heart and resides in the mysteries of inspiration. I was thinking the Greek version of genius to “The Man Who Knew Infinity”, and the mysterious source of Ramanujan’s inspirational mathematical breakthroughs.
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ReplyDeleteSince, in reality, it is impossible to set down some color without it also having value, chroma, size, shape, edge quality, texture, and relative location on a surface... I don't quite understanding the argument here.
ReplyDeleteThis is certainly the case, but these properties are not the properties of the colour but of that which contains it. These properties would continue to exist if the colour were substituted with monochromatic tone. A good way to think of it is the way in which water relates to the cup which holds it. The identity of the water, although shaped by the constraints of the cup is not defined by it. Fill the cup with wine or even empty it and the cup maintains its identity. Fluidity is definitionally opposed to that which is fixed, which means fluidity can surround that which is fixed (ornament over structure - climbing rose upon a trellis, rain upon the land) or be contained by it (structure containing ornament - the walled garden, river within the landscape).
This is not to say that the cup in not related to the water or that fluidity is not related to solidity or visa-versa. And your point is of course that this is very evident in real world experience. But this doesn't mean they are not distinct in how the nature of their being acts upon our senses.
If this makes my argument clearer and you can to some extent agree with it then how I address your second point should be a little less problematic.
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ReplyDeleteHey Kev,
ReplyDeleteThanks for laying all that out, but I'm afraid to say I simply cannot get my head around it. So much so, I feel we could be talking past each other here. So, here are a couple of thoughts that occurred to me after reading it a fourth time...
You talk of 3D colourspace - This, as far as I think I understand it, is a conceptual model that is imposing cartesian mathematics to represent it as a coloured sculpture. So even in its virtual representation we have 'a form that is coloured'.
The grey issue (gray in USAspeak) - To me, is just a case of value (tone) that does not possess chroma and therefore not saturated to any degree with colour.
I cannot see how form can be a property of colour, but I can see how colour can be a property of form. One might just as well say that form is a property of texture or even mass, which is not the case - rusting iron could be an infinite number of shapes, but a polished Chevrolet housed in a collector's garage, or covered in weeds and flaking in a breaker's yard, is still the shape and weight of a Chevvy.
So, perhaps the following will give some idea of how I'm following your line of argument:
When I'm painting I do not conceive of colour as something being added onto a surface, rather I think of it as a substance out of which I am making and articulating space and form, as it's progenitor, if you will. Yet when I paint using just black and white I'm thinking and conceiving of tone in exactly the same way.
To sum up, my understanding is that value (tone) is the substance from which form and space is made and colour the anointing component of that.
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ReplyDeleteCan you not build form with a piano? Is tension not form? Is rhythm not form? Is a chord not forming a space?
ReplyDeleteThis has helped the penny drop regarding my understanding of what you are putting forth here. And yes, this is how I think of the dynamics, let me call it that, of colour.
This also seems to clarify what I think is the area of our disagreement. I see structure as distinct from the means by which it is realised. So, the structure of a house is distinct from the bricks and timber from which it is built, the notes of a chord distinct from the relations between those notes that state the chord etc etc. It's a heaven and earth relationship, the architect and the building materials. Bricks do not assemble themselves into a house, and as I see it, the same goes for colour.
A sculpture is the articulation of the stone, but 'stone itself' has no articulation. A colour effect in a painting is the articulation of its colours, but 'colour itself' has no articulation.
'OK, what about the articulation of a rainbow?' I imagine you asking. I would reply that this is a manifestation of a suite of relationships within an area of nature that articulate it into becoming.
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ReplyDeleteHey Kev,
ReplyDeleteYes, materials aren't architecture. Why would I think otherwise?
This is why I'm having trouble understanding your argument stemming from the assertions; "...you could not longer support the idea that color is distinct from form. Color is utterly structured..." because to my mind this is the same as saying "...you could no longer support the idea that material is distinct from architecture. Material is utterly structured..."
You see my difficulty? One of us or both of us must be missing something in what the other is saying.
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ReplyDeleteWell Kev, my own belief about this is based on the actual practice, the procedural, participatory knowing if you will, of painting itself. So I too am talking from the experience of actual paintings, albeit from a different perspective. On this basis I can only concur with you in so far as when the colour component is foregrounding in my mind during working I'm aware of a sense of some 'principle of colour meaningfulness' that I'm allowing myself to be guided by. Or something like that.
ReplyDeleteThat said, the same applies, at least in my mind, to structural form. So, we're back again to colour and form being ingredient/materials guided by some 'higher sense' found seemingly both within and beyond us.
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ReplyDeleteBy consciousness.
ReplyDeletePS: Your belief that I am not responding to any of your points, and my belief that this is what I've been doing all along, shows that something I said earlier must be correct: the sense that we are somehow managing to talk past each other on this one, despite our mutual spirit of good faith! :)
ReplyDeleteSorry Kev, the two comments above are by me but the bloody interface here changed again and wrong-footed me!
ReplyDelete