Artists Colours: A Brief History of Eastern & Western Archetypes

Introduction
In the twentieth century there has been a virtual explosion in the meaning of painting with colour. Not only radically new media such as painting with coloured light, as on the computer monitor, but brain-blowing concepts in the minds of the artists have opened the whole field to widely differing new ideas, from those which play intellectual games with the parameters of colour, like Vasareley, to those who stir the guts by painting, for example, with nuances of colours thought to have been remembered from experiences in the womb, as in the case of Salvador Dali.

Colour is a prime factor in painting. Styles of colour have changed dramatically over the aeons. The textured earths used by primitive man have a special beauty which can be compared with the smooth crystal clarity of some of the symbolic colouring of Egyptian painting, or the subtle nuances of Chinese painting of the Sung dynasty. The radiant intensity of Gothic stained glass of the12th century is the result of a painter using the colour of the glass; and this can be compared with the decorative dragee colours of Florentine mural painting, and the rich and 'sonorous' colours of the high renaissance and baroque. Rococo paintings were often seen under cascades of light flashing from the glass prisms of the chandeliers, along with a veritable tintinabulation of chiming clocks, which made it easy to be persuaded by the scientific theories of the music and colours of the spheres. With the classical revivals a superb restrained classical palette was re-introduced. And it was the degeneration of the classical palette into an academic 'brown sauce' that helped to stimulate the new thinking about colour that is with us today.

DP

PAVEY, D. and OSBORNE, R. (1998) Artists' Palettes and Colour Mixing. From the late 20th century to prehistory, covering the important movements and the palettes of the great masters.