Veil of Color

• During the Renaissance, where did an artist go to get paint? Often to an alchemist. Paint consisted of minerals, dug from the earth, often semi-precious stones. The artist or his assistant laboriously ground it and mixed it with linseed oil. There were no tubes, so they had to mix for the session.

• Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, advances in chemistry produced a plethora of new pigments, fantastic colors that the world had never seen. Artists (Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin) explored the possibilities of the new pigments.

• Artists became aware of a different way of seeing. It had always been there of course, but had never been articulated before. Claude Monet painted a quick little painting of the sun rising over a harbor on a foggy day. He called it “Impression, Sunrise,” and critics took that up as a snarky term: “Impressionism.” Artists have always painted sketches, of course. The difference was that he exhibited it as a finished painting, a radical statement. He went on to paint the facade of Rouen cathedral at different times of the day, with different types of light falling on it. In these paintings the very solid, almost cliff-like cathedral is dissolved into a veil of color, which demands that we experience its reality almost as peripheral vision, an instant of seeing.

• Our eyes have two kinds of cells. Cones confer color vision, while rods are more sensitive to value (dark & light). In a painter’s mind, value often contradicts color. Value is often more closely connected to the left-brained, verbal world: we see something and reflexively think, “What is that thing?” As artists we also need to be able to access pure seeing, independent of our verbal minds. Our challenge as artists is to be able to move around in both worlds, the verbal and the non-verbal.