color values

The most important thing that I learned in Jef Gunn’s Intermediate Painting class was to consider the value of colors. Value refers to light and dark, the lightest value 10 being white and the darkest 0 being black and a spectrum of grays between them. One usually hears values discussed in reference to black and white photography, see for example Ansel Adams’ zone system. Color is a made up of Hue, Value and Chroma, but generally when people talk about color they talk about hue, as in Red, Yellowish-Red, or Cool Red.

Many aspects of Munsell’s color system and color theory in general get excessively complicated, but remembering to consider the values of the colors I’m using in a painting has been become important to me. After having this revelation about value I reviewed some of my older paintings that I disliked. When putting the image into grayscale I noticed that many of my problematic areas occurred from having too many colors of a similar value in the painting or having colors of great disparity in value next to each color.

In other parts of this blog I refer to the fact that I try to have some modulation and rendering in the forms in my paintings, such that there is a light and shadow within the form (though not really a consistent light source for the entire painting) or light and dark informing the foreground and background of the painting. Now periodically I check photos of my paintings in grayscale to look for value disparities.

If I’m being vague or convoluted or just uninteresting, let me bring up a different example. My favorite artist for the last few years is Raimonds Staprans. Like most of the Bay Area artists that I like he was an abstract expressionist at the beginning of his career and transitioned into figure painting in the sixties. He has referred to himself as an abstract realist and that he only paints real objects as a means to play with color. While this might sound contradictory, what it means in a practical sense is that in a painting of a pear you can tell that it is a pear, but at the same time there are colors used to paint the pear that are not generally pearlike, teal, blue-violets, and pale oranges. Below I have one of Staprans’ paintings of a chair, the first in second in black and white, the second in color. In the b&w everything looks like its been rendered realistically (with exception to the post-modern/pentimento fifth leg), clear highlights, midtones, and shadows. In the color version instead of the highlight being a pale tan, the midtone being a ochre brown, and the shadow being a warm sienna as you might expect there are instead yellow-green highlights, gray green midtones, orange midtones, cool and warm blues as the shadows. One’s first perception of the color version could be that it’s wildly expressionistic, but the colors have been chosen very carefully to create realistic values.