ColorAcademy 2005 - Education

Education

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'Languages' of Painting and Colour
by Don Pavey

An illustrated commentary on the concept of languages of expression devised by the art teacher Barclay Russel in the 1960's.

After studying many hundreds of paintings by young people, Barclay Russell came to the conclusion that although young painters were all different they did often share certain attitudes of mind in common, and that each of these attitudes could be identified as dealing with a different aspect of life and experience. Because of this, the work of the young people could be sorted into a number of easily identifiable clusters. Ordinarily and unexceptional though they were, the young artists expressed themselves in ways that were constantly recurring. Behind the infinitely varied worlds that their pictures unfolded, Barclay Russell detected a number of visual attitudes or modes of expression which he called 'languages'. These art forms were often likely to be unfamiliar to grown ups, and it was important that an art teacher should be able to recognize them as having valid precedent in the history of art, or indeed in therapeutic art. A young person's natural flow of expression was likely to dry up if the appropriate aesthetic mode wasn't appreciated and given proper encouragement.

The paintings of most young people, as thought by Barclay Russell, tended to reveal at least one of the expressive languages as playing a main role in a picture. But it was rare to find a painting that was an example of one type alone, 'pure' and unaccompanied by others. More often, several languages were present in the same picture for a young painter was likely to have come under many influences. On this account Barclay Russell felt that it was important that art teachers should be able, not only to tune into the uniqueness of each individual, but also to be able to recognize all the different possible modes of expression in painting.

The following pictures illustrate Barclay Russell's languages of painting:

Simple General description: Naive or primitive, but strong and large scaled pictorial effects.
	Barclay Russell said that the 'SIMPLE' language expresses a largeness of vision and a comprehension of many different phenomena of nature in a particularly direct and simple form, which gives it great lucidity and effectiveness. Expression is factual rather than evocative. Large forms such as those of landscape are often portrayed with an element of 'architectual' feeling; and, quite complicated scenes of much circumstantial detail are taken in and given greatly simplified pictorial form. With this goes a certain stiffness of arrangement. Facts are plainly but naively stated, and in the treatment of figures and animals there is a corresponding 'woodenness' sometimes approaching stylisation. . . primitive paintings may be simple, but the quality of simplicity can be retained in more developed work, as in the almost universal style used in portraying animals and birds to illustrated early Natural Histories, or in the wood engravings of Thomas Bewick, or the paintings of Christopher Wood.
1. A man in powdercolours by a 10 year old.

Romanesque sculpture is in the same language. (BARCLAY RUSSELL 1955).

Colour ( Hue and Saturation)
Highly saturated colour oppositions may predominate generally, but sometimes the simplicity of shape may also, for example, allow contrasts from opposite colours of low saturation.

Tone (Lightness or darkness of colour and/or neutrals)
Shapes or forms are likely to be modelled simply or left flat and are usually a lot lighter or darker than the ground.

Linework
The drawing is likely to be heavy and stylised.

Design (Composition of shapes and forms)
A schematic arrangement of powerful shapes is abstracted from a simple situation, and the artist uses a naive form of geommetry which can carry a great deal of symbolism if necessary.

Flat General Description: An essentially three-dimensional situation is rendered in a flat two-dimensional form.
	FLAT painting speaks entirely in terms of two dimensions. The translation of related solid forms of the subject into a flat equivalent if instinctive and not a piecemeal use of silhouette or section. This resolution of a three dimensional world onto a flat surface is sensitive to the influence of one form on another so that the quality of design in the whole picture is pre-eminent and absolute. The colour has heightened significance, and pattern, texture and repetition are naturally basic to this language. Byzantine mosaics and icons, Persian paintings and rugs, and much early European art is in this language. The perception from which these arts arise is also possessed by some children. 'Flat' painting is above all others appropriate to mural decoration, mosaic and textile design. Some of the easel paintings of le Douanier Rousseau, Braque and other moderns show the same quality. (BARCLAY RUSSELL 1955).
2.Sitting girl by Brian Charley, age 12, Lauriston Secondary School, mid 1950's.

Colour ( Hue and saturation)
Often fairly saturated giving a rich and decorative appearence to important areas of the design.

Tone (Lightness or darkness of colour and/or neutrals)
Motifs are usually unmodelled or unshaded and often either a lot lighter or a lot darker than the ground.

Linework
Drawing is usually formal in appearence with carefully drawn lines of medium thickness, giving a naive or primitive impression.

Design (Composition of shapes and forms)
Naive representational geommetry, sometimes with large patterning.

Decorative General Description: The patterned image using relatively large flat areas of tone and colour.
	DECORATIVE artists select and treat their subject matter in a way that allows them to exploit and enjoy the possibilities of the medium in which they're working. In painting, the use of flat areas of tone, colour and patterned surface comes naturally to this type of artist, who is more concerned with finding an immediate and enjoyable use of tools and materials than with the expression of any other more remote and less tangible experience. In this sense the work of the 'decorative' artist is playful, perhaps even superficial, but it can often express a sensitive feeling for abstract relationships and for the niceties of painting as a craft. A 'decorative' interpretation of the visible world can moreover be a subtle comment on reality. The paintings of Veronese, Rococo artists, Rex Whistler, Paul Dufy and Matisse are examples of this language. (BARCLAY RUSSELL1955).
Vase of flowers painted by Carol Ross, age 10, Middle Park School, 1954.

Colour ( Hue and saturation)
A decorative layout will especially lend itself to all kinds of colour experiment, and any degree of impact or sophistication would be appropriate. The play of large areas of full saturation one against another, or smaller focal areas of high saturation against larger areas of low saturation, would be right.

Tone (Lightness or darkness of colour and/or neutrals)
Focal areas of strong tonal contrasts within the patterning, and clear and unambiguous tonal contrasts or clearly stepped gradations of tone would be appropriate.

Linework
Repeated geommetrical features, such as circles, spokes, wave forms, hyperbolas, and so on, would be appropriate.

Design (Composition of shapes and forms)
The basically simple patterning of motif and ground may involve symmetries and may be freely or rigidly geometrical.

Story Telling General Description: From narrative painting to strip cartoon, a mode that requires a capacity for remembering and combining images.
	The STORY TELLING quality consists of a very literal and general unimaginative illustrative ability. The artist is often well satisfied with his accomplishment and is not always open to suggestion or criticism. . . Understanding of colour and tone values may be small, but there is often in this type an ability to adopt stereotype conventions in design and drawing, leading to an eclecticism. (BARCLAY RUSSELL 1955).
Jubilee of George V and Queen Mary by Audrey Hill, age 12, Highbury Hill High School, 1935.

Colour ( Hue and saturation)
Saturated colours are likely to be used to emphasise details. A larger ground colour needs to be of low saturation so that items 'read'.

Tone (Lightness or darkness of colour and/or neutrals)
This mode usually requires a ground which is either very light or very dark, so that contrasting tones can be used for the play of focal motifs.

Linework
Fairly fine descriptive drawing needs to be in contrasting tone from that of the ground. Adolescent work in this mode didn't often live up to this requirement in Barclay Russell's experience and he deprecated much of it as crude and insensitive to relationships of form and design.

Design (Compositions of shapes and forms)
The need to give a lot of information means that individual shapes may be rendered in a visual 'shorthand', and the composition crowded with items.

Lyrical General Description: Thoughtful and poetic, often acutely perceptive and rhythmical expression of serenity and movement.
	The LYRICAL language destills from the world of nature and everyday life a poetic of harmony and serenity. This vision is almost universal before adolescence, and takes the form of a delight in precise detail lovingly and realistically portrayed. In some cases it continues beyond adolescence to an adult maturity. A defused form is quite commonly found in older children. . . Artists of this kind include Richard Wilson, Guardi, Claude Lorraine, Paul Nash, Botticelli, and Chinese painters of the Sung and Mind dynasties. (BARCLAY RUSSELL 1955).
Cat rescue by unknown artist of the mid 1950's.

Colour ( Hue and saturation)
Larger areas of harmonious but less saturated hues, sometimes with the play of smaller focal areas of more intense saturation.

Tone (Lightness or darkness of colour and/or neutrals)
One might usually expect larger areas of a middle or light range of tones, sometimes with a dance of 'melodic' focal areas much lighter or darker than the tones of the ground.

Linework
Rhythmical flowing lines with acutely sensitive drawing.

Design (Composition of shapes and forms)
Perceptively observed shapes and forms that are rhythmical and flowing.

Impressionism General Description: The free handling of paint to create light and movement.
	The IMPRESSIONIST quality in painting is commonly found in the work of children. It is the expression of the type of vision which instinctively abstracts from the world of visual experience the dramatic qualities of movement and light. These are swiftly and instinctively summarised in term of a subtle exploitation of pigment, with free of brush strokes to produce textures and gradations. A sense of tone develops quickly when a child paints like this. Colour is usually used in a unified and generalised way. The paintings of Rubens, Turner and Constable, as well as the historical Impressionists, are included in this wider view of Impressionsim. (BARCLAY RUSSELL 1955).
Tree composition from Haberdashers' Aske's Boys School, produced in the late 1930's.

Colour ( Hue and saturation)
Colour is not necessarily broken down into spectral mixtures of dots of pure colour, but is used freely to create the effect of light.

Tone (Lightness of darkness of colour and/or neutrals)
The effects of light and darkness are likely to be used to bring out qualities of movement and atmosphere.

Linework
The full brushstroke and the flecked line can have a special role here.

Design (Compositions of shapes and forms)
Emphasis is always likely to be on observed details characteristic of the scene, rather than on the conceptual whole.

Architectural General Description: A style in which forms and divisions of the composition are massed one against another.
	ARCHITECTURAL or three dimensional expression is concerned with the relationship of masses and volumes, building up and contrasting in three dimensional space. When found in adolescence work it ows very little to, and may be quite lacking in, academic correctness of perspective, but nevertheless achieves a dynamic completeness depending on an impressive realisation of form and scale. Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, artists of the Italian High Renaissance, and Courbet all show a strong element of this quality. (BARCLAY RUSSELL 1955).
City scene by C. Hartley, age 16, 1935.

Colour ( Hue and Saturation)
The classical palette of earths (red and yellow ochre, black and white) could be particularly important, mixed to give 'natural colours' of stone and flesh, landscape, etc. However, according to the mood of architecture (fairground, factory, office, crematoria) the whole range of hues and hue-saturations could be appropriate.

Tone (Lightness or darkness of colour and/or neutrals)
Emphasis may sometimes fall on the articulations of shapes and planes.

Linework
A rough technical-type draughtsmanship could be expected here.

Design (Compostions of shapes and forms)
Vertical and horizontal emphasis is likely to be particularly important; and three dimensional form transcends mere accuracy and perspective projection, thereby giving work a certain monumentality. This concept could also be applied to the structure of human beings.

Dramatic General Description: Forms human or non-human appear in dynamic opposition to one another, so that the effect is of an emotional charge.
	The DRAMATIC is Dependent on the isolation of emotional, dramatic and psychological relationships, achieving this effect by hightened tone contrasts and incisive line rather than by caricature. . . (BARCLAY RUSSELL 1953) In one form. . . figures and groups are as living creations moving in a world of their own. . . in an adult form it lends itself to the scathing mordant cynicism of political comment or cartoon. . . It appears also in another form in the primitive expression of Mexican and [African] art, and
Railway accident, artist and school unkown, 1936.

perhaps in a form par excellence in the psychologically penetrating. . . drawings of Rembrandt. (BARCLAY RUSSELL 1955).

Colour ( Hue and saturation)
Colours may depend more on lighting contrast than hue and saturation. Dramatic violence may be echoed in the intensity of the colour oppositions.

Tone (Lightness or darkness of colour and/or neutrals)
The heightened contrast of light against dark will be dramatic, just as dark motifs silhouetted against light raise dramatic tension.

Linework
Firmly drawn dominant features; powerfully rendered linework.

Design (Compositions of shapes and forms)
Motifs in the composition move in a world of forms like those in a melodrama. Dramatic intensity may be reflected in threateningly diagonal or radiating emphasis.

Intellectual General Description: An abstract or analytical Cubist type of expression, as of a range of painter's works from those of Piero della Francesca to those of Juan Gris.
	INTELLECTUAL painting shows itself in the over precise summary of the able literary or mathematical mind, and sometimes expresses itself in abstract form. In its early stages at twelve or thirteen years it's generally confused and unresolved, but it may later reach a remarkable clarity transcending self consciousness. It delights only too often in over complicated subject matter. In the really scholarly child it employs a rather frigid range of colour, in some ways akin perhaps to musical sensibility.
The art room. In powdercolour from a 13 year old girl.

The works of Raphael and Ben Nicholson are examples of its nature (BARCLAY RUSSELL 1955).

Colour ( Hue and saturation)
Gradations of colour harmonies and apparent translucencies as if from overlays, all in hues of low saturation would be appropriate and clarity of hue-contrasts of focal areas is likely to be important; and the colder hues may well have a role here.

Tone (Lightness or darkness of colour and/or neutrals)
Subtleties in gradations of tone, as well as bland and low contrasts of tone are likely to be in evidence, with perhaps a special tonal emphasis on intersections and interpenetrations of shapes and divisions of space.

Linework
Fine calligraphic or geometric linework is predictable.

Design (Composition of shapes and forms)
The complex geometrical analysis of an objective scene is likely to embody supposedly symbolic or cryptic motifs.

Emotional General Description: An expressionist use of brushwork, colour and paint quality in the evocation of an emotion.
	Emotional painting expresses a particular aspect of nature and experience in terms of an especially heightened and often violent use of colour, with a pictorial unity also special to this language. Among adolescents who 'cannot draw' but are strongly stimulated by visual experience it is a powerful and necessary means of resolution and expression, and to the educationally 'subnormal' and retarded children it is a ready outlet. Intensity of emotional experience is reflected in strong, sometimes dazzling contrasts of colour and tone, and a swift vigorous use of the brush.
At the cinema, by AC Brome, Flora Gardens Girls' School, mid 1930's.

The paintings of van Gogh, Rouault and the Expressionist painters are examples of its adult form. (BARCLAY RUSSELL 1955).

Colour ( Hue and saturation)
Colour is used to express emotion, from sad or introspective harmonies of the cold and low intensity greyed hues, for example, to explosive yellows contrasted with dark blues or blacks.

Tone (Lightnes or darkness of colour and/or neutrals)
Spot-lighting of forms in darkness will give a dramatic range of expressions. Dark motifs on a light ground will usually give a less theatrical range of expressions.

Linework
The expressive brushline is of the essence in building up shapes and forms of the design.

Design (Composition of shapes and forms)
Shapes and forms deriving from free brushwork.

Haptic General Description: A very introspective type of art in which artists project themselves, their anxieties, tactile and gut sensations onto the things perceived.
	HAPTIC painting is an expression of a special kind of introverted perception, rather than the product of direct observation. This vision of the 'inner eye' seems to be of great clarity and intensity. Objects are represented with a classical entirely and finality of statement, each detail or part of a picture being a complete creation and statement in itself, while, seen as a whole, the details build up with overmastering vitality and seriousness into a complete pictorial unity. An instincitve surrealism is sometimes present. This language is common amon certain children who, through it, often achieve a great lucidity of statement. The same attitude is found in the work of American Primitives of the 18th and 19th centuries. It brought about much of the work of the Middle Ages, when it was often combined with a strong mystical and religious feeling. This is also the case in Chinese and other forms of Eastern art. (BARCLAY RUSSEL 1955).
Painting by JB Joel, Woolwich Polytechnic, approximately mid 1950's.

Colour ( Hue and saturation)
Cold colours, blues and greed blues, muddy effects expressing anxiety could be appropriate, and colours reflecting emotive conditions. Parametric steps or intervals can express anxiety if they are unequal or very irregular.

Tone (Lightness or darkness of colour and/or neutrals)
Unequal gradations, and large areas of darkness are likely.

Linework
Drawing is likely to be distorted for the expression of some kind of gut sensation or inadequacy of ones own body image.

Design (Composition of shapes and forms)
Imbalance and those unharmonic divisions of space that express anxiety, or shapes and motifs reflecting or symbolising internal sensations.

Mystical General Description: An allegorical, dream-like or surreal mode of expression.
	MYSTICAL expression deals with profound mysteries, beyond the bounds of words or any finite statement. Allegory and symbol, often of a religious kind, are frequently used; the more simple the metaphor, the more eloquent and profound the expression. A highly emotional use of colour and haptic and surrealist qualities are quite commonly found alongside. All these qualities may be used by the adolescent to explore spiritual conceptions. . . From among many 'mystical' artists, Fra Angelico and El Greco are examples of this type. (BARCLAY RUSSELL 1955).
Three Indians. In powdercolours by a 12 year old girl.

Colour ( Hue and saturation)
Mystery - subtleties of hues of close intervals on the spectrum and close gradations of saturation. Allegorical - effects of lucid clarity. Magical - optical effects (the flicker of opposite colours placed together, for example).

Tone (Lightness or darkness of colours and/or neutrals)
Mystical - nebulous effects. Allegorical - clarity of legibility appropriate to symbolic communication. Magical - the dazzle or staccato optical effect.

Linework
Mystical - the vague, fused, dragged or scumbled line. Allegorical - clear drawing. Magical - the hypnogogic, or geometrical and invocatory line as of a pentagram.

Design (Composition of shapes and forms)
Mystical effects are usually thought of as vague and atmospheri, as if seen through a glass darkly. Allegorical presentations tend to include imagery that is relatively real or even surreal. Magical effects are likely to involve surprise and motif-ground ambiguities or optical illusions.

Acknowledgements

The National Art Education Archives at Bretton Hall, West Yorkshire for the illustrations.

D.P.

Sources

BARCLAY RUSSELL, A. (1953) 'Art and the Adolescent' in ZIEGFELD, E. (ed) Education and Art. Paris : UNESCO, p.48.
BARCLAY RUSSELL, A. (1955) The Language of Painting. London: LCC. A typescript. Barclay Russell's writings and collection of children's paintings are lodged in the National Art Education Archive at Bretton Hall, Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

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