The Senator's Question.
va...@cwu.edu
>Back there in time somewhere, when I was really
>interested in the works of Hofmann, probably having seen something
>of his for the first time, I failed to experience either "push" or "pull" while
>viewing his work.
Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it's not there. *Well trained*
modern artists have spent years of discipline to learn to see the effects
of color and value on pictorial space. It's there. I've seen it.
> I don't think that just
>because one regurgitates what most landscape artists already knew,
>and presents it as a new dictum for abstract artists, that it
>necessarily works in practice.
What landscape artists do you know that work with ambiguous
pictorial space? Every competent landscape artist I've seen
maintains a consistent and concrete spatial image--unless you're
going to include artists such as Gauguin.
>It may be that, whereas landscape
>artists are able to diffuse and create subtle, atmospheric effects
>to advantage, abstract artists have more difficulty simply because
>of the brilliant hues, bold shapes, and un-familiar (to the viewer)
>subject matter.
Why do you think all abstract artists work with brillian hues etc.?
And what makes you think that abstract artists can't work with subtle
atmospheric effects? De Kooning was well trained in Holland and
made very subtle atmospheric and color adjustments to maintain
that absolutely flat picture-plane in both reality and illusion.
Painters such as Barnett Newman and Olitski use, and reverse,
both atmospheric and color perspective to acheive their
binocular effects. Larry Poons, in his elipse paintings uses
a subtle reversal of the classic color theory you mention to create
an "atmosphere" of confetti with his elipses: Some are tuned
in both value and color to recede into the background, while
others contrast in both value and color to advance even out
in front of the painting.
>By that I mean, when we look at a landscape that
>uses the traditional color scheme--warms in foreground receding to
>cools in background--we are looking at a scene that corresponds
>to what we know of the physical world. When we look at a new work
>of abstract art, we are first of all reacting to something that is
>un-familiar, trying to "get it" so to speak.
The color scheme you refer to is the old classic color theory: warms tend to
appear salient while cools appear to recede. Furthermore, the tail of this
theory, written as early as in Leonardo's notebooks, states that because
of the scattering effects of blue light, light areas in the far distance will
tend to drift toward red, while dark areas in the far distance will tend to
drift toward blue.
But that is only one specific Renaissance instance of color perspective.
The effect can and has been reversed so that cools advance and warms
recede--as Gainsborough proved in his "Blue Boy" during the eighteenth
century to show Reynolds that he was not standing on the only wire that
leads straght to the phone on the desk of Jesus.
The fauves used this form of color perspective to reverse the effects of
warm and cool several times within a painting. Color perspective is outlined
as follows:
Contrast between the color *temperature* of figure and ground advances.
(That is, a warm figure on a cool ground, or a cool figure on a warm
ground tends to advance visually.)
Saturate color tends to advance. That ought to be self-explanatory.
Furthermore, there is more to looking at a painting than just seeing.
There is perception.
>I don't question that Hofmann was correct in his theory. I just think
>that there is too much psychological baggage we all carry that
>either aids and abets or interferes with our reactions to the un-familiar.
>Anyone who has ever looked at photographic transparencies with
>brilliant red or yellow objects in the picture has seen the
>"push-pull" effect, or maybe "eye-popping" is more appropriate.
The best artists, like the best psychologists, speakers, or salesmen, are
quite aware of all that "psychological baggage" and work to exploit it
at every opportunity. They make us see things that are not there.
Vance