Color is at the center of what Degas and most of the Impressionists were doing. To understand Impressionist painting, it helps to know how color works and how to talk about it. Instead of just saying a painting looks nice, it's useful to be able to name what’s going on with color, light, and shadow. That’s especially important in Impressionism, since these artists were focused on capturing how light affects color—what some called colored light.
One basic term is hue, which just means color. You’ll see this word on paint tubes—hue refers to the name of the color itself. There are three main levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary.
Primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. These can’t be made by mixing other colors. When you mix two primary colors, you get a secondary color. For example, red and yellow make orange, blue and yellow make green, and red and blue make violet.
Tertiary colors come from mixing a primary color with a nearby secondary color, like red-orange or yellow-green. But when you mix two complementary colors—which are across from each other on the color wheel—you get brown. For instance, mixing orange and blue makes a type of brown. That’s because orange is made from red and yellow, and when you add blue, you’re combining all three primary colors. Depending on how much of each you use, you can get warm browns or cool browns. These are sometimes called earth tones, and include paint names like burnt sienna (a reddish brown) and burnt umber (a cooler, bluish brown). These kinds of tones showed up a lot in earlier painters like Velázquez.
Another key idea is intensity, also called saturation. Both words describe how pure a color is. A fully saturated color looks strong and clear. If you add white, you get a lighter version, called a tint, but it also becomes less intense. If you add black, the color darkens and also loses some of its intensity. Either way, adding black or white reduces the purity of the color. You can also lower intensity by mixing in the color’s complement. This “dulls” the color without making it lighter or darker. The changes in intensity can make a big difference in how the color feels in a painting.
Value structure refers to how light or dark something is. It's closely related to chiaroscuro, which means the use of light and shadow to create a sense of depth. Value structure works independently from hue (color) and saturation (intensity), but the three still affect one another. Understanding value can be confusing at first, especially when you're just starting to study color. The eye is actually built to detect light and shadow before it detects color. The retina contains more rods—which are sensitive to brightness—than cones, which detect color.
One example of how context affects value is a gray strip placed over a gradient of light to dark tones. Even though the gray strip stays exactly the same, it looks darker at the top when surrounded by lighter tones and lighter at the bottom when surrounded by darker ones. This effect shows how the brain interprets value based on surrounding contrast.
When color is added to value changes, the effect becomes even stronger. For instance, a strip of blue that shifts from light to dark with an orange-brown center strip appears to change depending on where it's placed. The blue and orange enhance each other because they are complementary colors—opposites on the color wheel. This contrast can make the colors appear more intense.
Colors also have temperature associations. Cool colors like blue, blue-green, and violet are linked with water and tend to visually recede. Warm colors like red, orange, and yellow are linked with fire and appear to come forward. These warm-cool relationships can make color stand out more depending on how they are used together.
For example, if you take a blue dot and place it on a dark background, it might look bright and stand out. If you move the same blue dot onto a mid-tone area, it may seem less vibrant. On a similarly dark blue background, it can almost disappear. This shows how a color’s surroundings affect how intense or noticeable it seems. The same is true for orange. On a blue background, orange appears brighter because it is the complementary color of blue. When converted to black and white, both may have nearly the same value, but in color, they look very different.
Mixing complementary colors reduces saturation. For example, adding yellow to purple makes the purple less intense and shifts its tone. This is one of the basic ideas behind optical mixing, a method used by the Impressionists. Instead of physically mixing paint, artists like Degas would apply slashes of pure color—such as yellow and green—side by side. From a distance, the eye blends them, creating a different color without actually combining the pigments.
This is where intensity becomes important. Intensity—or saturation—is the purity of a color. A fully saturated color is clear and strong. When white is added, the color becomes lighter and less intense (a tint). When black is added, the color becomes darker and also loses intensity. Intensity affects how we perceive light and shadow. For instance, a strip of green that fades from saturated to desaturated may appear to shift in brightness, but when turned to grayscale, it shows little change in value. This highlights how color and value can be confused.
In two paintings by Degas, these relationships become clear. One painting has a low-key palette, meaning it mostly uses subdued browns and tertiary colors. It has just a few bright red areas. The second painting uses a full range of more saturated, secondary colors, with little or no brown. It also includes strong contrasts between warm and cool colors—like orange and blue—across the canvas.
The painting with more intense color and warm-cool contrast appears to have stronger value structure, with more noticeable light and shadow. When both images are converted to black and white, the differences in shading aren’t as extreme. This shows that the use of warm and cool colors in the second painting creates the appearance of more depth and contrast, even when the actual value differences are similar.
To wrap up the idea of how color works beyond painting, it also plays a major role in film. One example is the movie Far From Heaven, which uses color deliberately throughout its scenes. The film is set in the 1950s and focuses on race and personal relationships. In it, different color palettes are used to reflect different emotional and narrative moments.
When the main female character is shown dealing with her husband's struggles—he’s closeted and unhappy—those scenes often have a greenish tint. This green tone becomes a repeated element tied to his storyline. When she visits an art museum and starts forming a connection with another character, a Black man, the palette shifts and becomes more colorful, including a broader range of hues. Color is used to reinforce emotional tone and relationships across the film.
In one still from the movie, she's sitting in a dim room with a bright light coming from the right. This lighting setup recalls chiaroscuro, a technique used in Baroque painting, especially by Caravaggio, where a sharp light cuts across the figure to create a sense of volume. But when the image is converted to black and white, the lighting appears more even than it seemed in color. The film uses warm light on one side and cooler blue tones on the other to create the illusion of strong contrast, even if the values are close in brightness. Color, in this case, enhances the feeling of shadow and light.
Degas worked with similar techniques. In his pastel drawing The Morning Bath, a woman is shown entering a tub. There’s a bluish tone on one side of her body—this is an example of non-local color, meaning it’s not the actual skin color but a chosen hue used to suggest shadow or cooler light. On the opposite side, he uses warmer colors. This warm-cool shift adds volume to the form and helps create the illusion of depth. When the drawing is shown in black and white, much of this effect disappears. Degas also used optical mixing in areas like the drapery, where broken lines of color are placed close together so they visually blend when viewed from a distance.
Another thing to note about Degas and other Impressionists is that, even though they often said their work was about light, color, and formal studies, the subject matter still reflected certain cultural views. Many of their works include nude female figures. These choices align with traditional representations of women from a male perspective—a concept often referred to as the male gaze. This can be seen in how Degas depicts the female body. A different approach can be found in the work of Mary Cassatt, who also painted women but from a different, often more private or everyday perspective. Her work presents a contrast to the more detached or observational way that male Impressionists portrayed the female figure.
https://www.udemy.com/user/kenneymencher/
No comments:
Post a Comment