When is a Color Not Just a Color?

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Blue Mountain 1908 Wassily Kandinsky

As artists, we work with colors every day—choosing paint pigments, squeezing them onto palettes, mixing them with other colors and then brushing or applying those mixes to a surface. After more than 50 years, we have acquired some proficiency in producing colors that we think we want. Often, we are spot on the first time, but not always. Back to mixing. Now for the next patch which will sit adjacent to the last. Mix, place, evaluate. Repeat. Our motto is, “Start with a confident mix and work out from confidence to confidence.” Sounds good on paper, but something curious happens as we paint any picture.

Picture-making is not just painting patches of a certain hue, value and shape, but is really about building a set of color relationships which all depend on and influence each other, sort of like a community. When that color community gets large enough, it can often happen that our first patches of color have to be repainted to work within the larger …