Vermillion Ideas

Light Vermillion

 Seville Still-Life, 1910-11. 

Oil on canvas. 

35" x 46."

Henri Matisse

Detail

Matisse painting Seville Still Life in Spain in 1910. Just as Picasso and other Modernists were appropriating influences from Africa, Islam, and Japan, Matisse here found Moorish design as a way of freeing himself from the particulars of realism.  The foreign designs became meat for Modernist ideas. Instead of using values to indicate space, in this canvas Matisse was dedicating himself to the Modernist ethos of the surface and the formal elements, or basic structure, of the picture. Color was his forward element, taking the place of value, and in this way Matisse was a pirate on the open seas of change. 


The surrounding patterns of emerald green with crimson notes control the composition, and the China blue chair cover gives visual movement and compliments the orange design of the central tablecloth. Everything supports the negative spaces of high intensity vermillion red. The celebration of negative space reenforces Matisse's idea of the the picture plane as the main thing. This is the essence of Modernism: innovation. We are not looking at Vasari's type of space; Henri Matisse owns a whole new archetype of picture space.

Compare the earlier still life, Crockery on a Table, which was created just ten years before the Seville work.

Henri Matisse

Crockery on a Table, 1900.

oil on canvas

97 x 82 cm

Matisse is, even in 1900, concerned with design over all else. Here, he has added another length of canvas below the table top to allow the objects to breath in a fully realized space. The extra negative space gives the coffee set an elevated position, and proper importance. 

This essay by artist Paul Corio says much about Matisse's colorist ways:

I've been thinking about Matisse a lot lately, for a number of reasons. I'm teaching a color course with a pattern component right now, and needless to say, it's a good time to revisit with a fresh eye a lot of the pictures that I've seen a million times.

 Without gushing about his mastery, I'll say this: he was a master. Like his friend Bonnard, he could confound figure and ground without painting abstract pictures; using limited value contrasts to mash objects back into the flattened, shallow space, and using pattern to bring the ground almost all the way up to the picture plane. He could also paint people without making pictures about people, which is a much bigger deal than it sounds like - his figures had no particular psychology to explore, they exist on the same plane (literally and figuratively) as the still-life elements, furniture, textiles, and the other objects and spaces in the pictures. Matisse used color as a leveler of those things, and like all great colorists he made it looks easy, which led (and still leads) many to question the scope of his achievement.

 by Paul Corio

Further study:

Matisse: Life and Painting

Matisse at The Colorist

Color Sense - Quotes

This was first posted in July, 2013.

These pages are jpegs, and may be copied and printed for your studio.  Assembled by Casey Klahn.

5 Things Captain Kirk Teaches You About Art

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Why consider James T. Kirk, of TV's Star Trek fame, as an example for artists?  Mostly because of thing number 1, presented below.  The Kobayashi Maru story is about innovation, and I want artists (and other leaders who might be reading) to grasp some break-out thinking styles like that represented in the fictional stories of Star Trek.

Captain Kirk is the protagonist of TV's Star Trek, a 1960's science fiction drama set in the distant future.  Many forget that in the sixties, entertainment still relied on drama, instead of special effects, to carry the plot. William Shatner, as Captain James T. Kirk, dished up drama to an absurd level, and we ate it with a spoon. Star Trek and Kirk enjoy a cult following today, and it is fun to draw analogies from this fiction.

5 Things Captain Kirk Teaches You About Art

1. The Kobayashi Maru.

The Kobayashi Maru is the name of a fictional Star Trek training exercise where Kirk finds a solution that redefines the problem, especially when faced with a no win scenario.

Another way of explaining the art principle involved here is to describe lateral solutions.  A common problem in painting, such as which color to choose next, may be solved by choosing the local color (true, common color of an object), which is boring and expected, or by selecting the complement of the local color (the opposite color on a color wheel), which may also be expected. My favorite lateral solution: choosing an unexpected color anywhere else on the color wheel. This sometimes manifests itself as choosing the one color that is proscribed by good technique: it is garish, sick, and unexpected.  Now, you have a whole new set of colorist issues at play, and fun and enjoyment is revived in your painting.

2. McCoy versus Spock.

In Star Trek, Dr. Leonard McCoy is the ship's red-blooded, plain-spoken physician, and Mr. Spock is the first officer, a half-alien who is dispassionate, and over-burdened with logic.  They present a dichotomy of ideas when adverse scenarios confront our hero, Kirk:  emotion versus logic.

Artists have learned to seek out ambiguity.  Does it need any more explanation than this: the expanding of possibilities is increased by posing questions? Antimony is your friend, if you want to discover new paradigms.

3. Struggle Much.

CPT Kirk is a warrior character, an armed forces spaceman who battles seemingly invulnerable alien forces of the universe. Do we struggle as artists in the studio, when faced with the blank canvas?

Some have an aversion to the word "struggle" as a description of the artist's way.  Not me.  Certainly you have to admit there is a surfeit of creative inertia in the world, and especially among artists working today.  I want to overcome that force, to do new things, and I want to do that every time I approach the blank paper.  It is an inner struggle.

4. Thirst for knowledge.

James T. Kirk was called "a stack of books with legs." His insatiable curiosity about the universe drove him onward, and his broad knowledge helped him in troubled times.

Art is created, in part, by the out flowing of knowledge.  At the very basic level, it is knowing what things look like, so that even the abstractionist must use the image of things as a wraith; he avoids the look of things on purpose, or else represents images by other images.  

On a greater level, the artist knows what images have gone before him, and uses that knowledge to spring forward into new terrain.  The universe of knowledge available regarding art history, art, and the look of things is only the start.  Add to these disciplines the full gamut of liberal studies, and you begin to identify the role of the artist as greater than meets the eye.  Artists are cultural leaders because they study the universe, and represent it in new ways.

5. Skill.

A Starfleet captain of Kirk's caliber has a full and broad range of skills. CPT Kirk is the best of the best and much admired for his skills and abilities.

Skill is traditionally recognized as a key element in an artist's makeup. But, Modernist artists have said they are against skill.  This is well and good as a philosophy of art, but an argument can be also made to demonstrate the high skill levels of masters like Egon Schiele, Odilon Redon, and Henri Matisse. Matisse, at the apex of Modernism, is also held up as one of the great draftsmen of history.

Skill alone does not make the artist.  But, every artist realizes more powers and abilities accrue with time. Enhancing your skill level is a great pursuit. 

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Finally, we admire CPT Kirk because he wanted to "...go where no man has gone before." You would do well to go where no artist has gone before.  Innovation is the soul of fine art. Think sideways to fool the inertia monster.  Accept asymmetry in your direction. Go to war with your own fears.  Seek new knowledge and hone your skills.  Here is where I'm tempted to say "live long and prosper," but that would be silly.

See also:
Five Leadership Lessons From Kirk


"Intuition, however illogical, is recognized as a command prerogative." Kirk in Obsession.


"Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, 'Today I will be brilliant.' " Kirk in The Ultimate Computer.

Quotes credit: http://voices.yahoo.com/best-quotes-captain-james-t-kirk-star-trek-204167.html

Red & Green Vignette

Red & Green Vignette
8.75" x 9"
Pastel
Casey Klahn

Yes, you did see this one here a few months ago.  This is the formal and better photo record.

Colors Afield

Click on the image to see it whole
All The Colors Field
small/ @ 3.5" x 7"
Pastel
Casey Klahn

Colorist Art Pins

Atonement, detail #1

@8" x 15"

Casey Klahn

This pastel I renamed "Atonement."  

What is colorist art?  That is a question I get asked much.  Try this Pinterest board for a visual commentary on colorist "ism."

Ahem. I Painted in This Guy's Studio, Once. Just Sayin...

My friend, oil painter and pastelist Ken Elliott, is not shy about putting down color.  Watch this fine artist create a colorist landscape, in its entirety, on video.  

For The Color blog.

Yellows Across the Lake

oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches

Ken Elliott

Response to Orange

Pinks & Greens
7.8" x 6"

Pastel

Casey Klahn

Violet Woods
6.25" x 9.2"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn

The Bunkhouse
6.5" x 8"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn

In thinking about the Orange post by artist Kate Beck, I wanted to revisit my own responses to orange. None of my artworks shown here are based on orange, but they rely on it to stay together.

Put a different way, orange misused can ruin a color composition. Orange is a poison, or a pleasure - it depends on how you use it. I did some orange based works a few years ago, but I don't have a record of them. They were rather crude, I think, but their color compositions held together.

One comment I'll make about the artworks posted above is that they don't resort to blue or green to counter-poise the orange. I'm happy about that, as those colors are too obvious and I want to say "easy" to turn to when making an orange composition.

Consider this a post where I begin to formulate my ideas on an orange-based series. It has been a long time coming, and I think Kate's post has given me the inspiration to git'r dun.

As a point of reference, here is a page with many Wolf Kahn orange-influenced works. Kahn has admitted that "Orange is a vulgar color, more than a little pushy." It takes an adventurous artist to play with orange!

New School Color Philosophy

Light in Branches
21" x 13"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn


Click This Image To Read The Text

Want to read more on New School Color as an art philosophy? Please consider the following posts:

Atonement & Automatism
Rough Drafts
Pink
Intuitive Choice in Art

Pencil Me

Pencil Me
Digital Image
Casey Klahn

Somewhere I saw a self portrait "call", and so I thought about this Photoshop. I decided to post it here and think about a direction for a self portrait.

Recently, I began an inventory on how many posts I was doing about myself. That's the big complaint about blog content, you see. My first results for a period of time showed 1/3rd of the posts were either fully or nominally about myself. I was happy with that, since my goal is to keep it broad here. Anyway, excuse the flagrant selfishness of this one, but it is a self portrait you know!

One Year of Blogging

Casey Klahn

One year of blogging is a cause for celebration. And reflection. And I also think it's a good time for visualizing the next year.

Thoughts about this blog:

The Colorist has logged about 295 posts in the last 364 days. During that time, it has grown and defined itself to be a good quality blog for art content, my personal views, and the broader ideas of colorist art. The first description of The Colorist went something like, "A newsletter for patrons of colorist art, without the artspeak".

Now, the banner reads, "New School Color - Casey Klahn". The subject tags immediately below say, "Abstract Expressionism, Art Criticism, Artists, Colorist Art, Drawing, History, Impressionism, Modern Art, Painting, Pastel, Post Impressionism".

The readership here, though fairly modest in quantity, do boast a high I.Q. I am grateful for you and for your willingness to learn and observe colorist art, art topics in general and my own artwork in particular.

On a good day, I may see 100 - 125 pageloads, but an average of the year is @ 65. Visitor counts are about 37 - 65 per day. I have evidence of more readership that Statcounter doesn't pick up, so I would say to those looking here trying to learn about successful blogging, don't trust the stats too closely. There are hidden referrers and filters involved. If you need big stats, you will have to post daily. That isn't my goal, and also not a realistic expectation for a Mr. Mom to young kids.

How am I stacking up to my self-established goals here? I think I'll award myself an A+. The resolved commitment to post regularly, and the expansion of my own artistic statement are probably the best highlights of the past year. Equal to that is the fellowship with like-minded art lovers. The readership here is probably half artists and the other half are not, but in many ways the art lover is the equal to the artist in making art live. Rothko has said that his art requires the spectator, and I hope that idea will be a bigger part of his legacy. It's a much better idea than Warhol's pull-quote about "fifteen minutes of fame," IMHO.

If you follow The Colorist closely, you know that my studio has been out of action for the better part of the past year. I am just now getting my new free-standing studio in shape. It has been a challenge to keep floating along on few postings of my own artworks. I see that my Label of "My Artwork" has been used 51 times, but I estimate that unique artwork postings only number about 30 or so. Drawings probably number about 20 (my PC is slow enough that I won't take the time now to count them all).

We are photo poor here at the Klahn studio, but during the past year I did manage to sell more art (dollar-wise) than ever before. I put it that way because my earlier days of selling art involved more pieces sold at lesser prices. I usually have about 50 pastels framed and ready to sell, but I don't get them all recorded properly. However, improvement in that department is happening, too.

One year ago I knew that my studio would be inactive while I dismantled the old and worked on the new. I had a feeling that it would be a slow process, and so I set this as a year of growth in other directions. Through the venue of this blog, my knowledge of art history and also of contemporary art has increased. My ability to define my own art in words has increased many, many times over. Now my new studio is almost ready to be productive, and that feels like book-ends to this past year.

As far as the goals for The Colorist are concerned, my desire has been to not be too focused on myself (Protestant values in action), but to have an outlet for evolving my written statement. The term "colorist art" is vague, and a perfect direction for an artist to grow new and unique work. Have I defined colorism yet? No. But I think I'm moving in the right direction. Alyson Stanfield has gently challenged me to write my "Colorist Manifesto", and she is completely right that there is room for more understanding of this contemporary art phenomenon.

On my goal list is to write the Wikipedia entry on new colorist art. The one there now on the subject: Colorist, while reasonably okay, is still lacking a good understanding of this movement. After that, the manifesto should be written. This blog's interaction with all of you has given me direction as far as the general and specific understanding of color and art. It won't be academic writing, but it will add at least one more kernel of insight into new color art.

It looks like I'll have to finish this thread with another post or two. I want to cover blogging in general and the future of The Colorist.

The Rational Versus the Irrational

Superman Comics features the idea of a Bizarro World, where everything is the opposite reality. Sort of a bizarre dimension of opposites. Well, here is my Bizarro World: a blog called Rational Color.

Keep in mind that if The Colorist theory exists as the opposite pole of Rational Color, that makes me the Bizarro side of the equation. Hmm. Feels funny. Me so happy.

Pink

Pink Forest
7.3" x 5.3"
Pastel
Casey Klahn

Pinks & Greens
7.8" x 6"

Pastel

Casey Klahn

Hill with Red Sky
12.5" x 9.5"
Pastel
Casey Klahn

The Four Seasons, Winter
14” x 10”

Pastel

Casey Klahn

The color pink is interesting for being really just light red, yet it has it's own name! Do blue and yellow demand equal treatment? Is it fair that light blue is just that, "light blue"?

The web is replete with sites that say things about pink, but I wish to avoid them. Their general bent is to assign meaning to the color, and I prefer to let you make your own associations. And my direction as a "colorist" artist leads me to avoid assigning meaning to any color. I am more interested in how pink interacts with other colors, and what the value ranges do to change these interactions.

The story of these paintings in pinks and greens is that I visualized doing an artwork with these colors, but it took me months of failure to finally get it the way I liked it. Then, what I learned from that first success (entitled "Pinks & Greens," above) enabled me to create more of them with this color composition.

Intuitive Choice in Art

Abstract Reds Over Blues
20" x 12"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn
Collection the Artist

Things are a little "static" around here, to use the web lingo. Let's revisit a popular post that should grease the skids of creativity;

Intuitive Choices

Under the tutelage of Diane Townsend I painted this abstract work. It has some elements of color field painting, like Mark Rothko, and extensive gestural elements. The gestural nature is in keeping with the drawing roots of the pastel medium. I like the way the paper's surface is evident, and yet the color blending, and heavily worked nature of the piece makes it work as a painting for me.

Let's talk a little bit about intuitive choices in fine art. The choices that a child makes are very intuitive, because their knowledge base is limited. The hands start moving, and the limitations are the length of their little arms, and the characteristics of the tools. They are mostly trying these tools out for the very first time.

A great deal is made of technique in art. The pastel medium is no exception. In fact, technical skill is probably too emphasized in this medium. It's supposed to be hard, you see. And, admittedly, there is much to know (much that I do not know!). Sometimes beginning steps are not rewarded very well by the outcomes.

"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things."
Edgar Degas said in a quote posted at Expo Degas.

So, intuition! First sketches with bold gestural marks always work better for me than deliberate and measured work. The thing is to have years and years of drawing from memory in one's back pocket, and then the quick marks made on the paper will seem intentional. I don't subscribe to the subtle and tentative working that is often required of detailed realistic work.

The same goes for compositional choices. It is not easy to describe, but I think that studying good composition is necessary, and then ought to be put out of one's mind. If you can internalize compositional knowledge, it will come out naturally as you draw. The best thing I can say is: "try it".

The ability to critique one's own art becomes more important when you want to be an intuition-driven artist. Did this one really turn out to have the best composition? Color Choices? Does it have too much to say for one painting? Ask these questions of yourself.

Wolf Kahn has a chair that he sits in and ruminates over his finished art. Most artists do take some time and distance away from their works to try and get an objective perspective on their own creations. It's challenging.

The pastel medium is "made to order" for the artist who wants to favor intuitive creation. It is a direct, and rewarding tool. It's interesting to consider that in the book, Wolf Kahn's Pastels, the great colorist chose to make the text a collection of essays on artistic process. A natural fit, I think.

New Links for the quoted post:

Diane Townsend.

Schama's take on art is somewhere between pointless and powerless, in my opinion. However, I offer you his link on Mark Rothko, here.

Poll Results

Quickly, the results of last week's content poll are, so far, an even spread for the following three subjects:

1. Colorist Art
2. Casey Klahn's Art
3. Pastel

I want to thank the readers for this input, and it gives me a great start in my search for what to continue to write about here at The Colorist.

Linky - Linky- Greety

Casey Klahn in Studio

The post title is blogger slang for saying "greetings" to the visitors coming in from Alyson Stanfield's ArtBizBlog, where she has a post entitled: Artist's Blogs to Fall in Love With.

Casey and Vincent at a Paint Out

So, welcome if you're new here. My blog is a process-type space where I post about "Colorist Art", in a new and modern sense. Also, things that I enjoy, such as art history that isn't too stodgy. An example would be my posts on Vincent van Gogh (who I interview here).

You know, there are precious few photos of the old keener, van Gogh. He hated the camera so. Here's an image he allowed me to have of our virtual visit in Paris, but only of his back.

Vincent and Moi Hold Forth

Another popular subject here at The Colorist is the medium pastel, which I favor. Here's a post about my chums in the pastel world. If you like, see my post about the founding pastelist herself, Rosalba Carriera.

My art can be viewed by clicking on My Artworks.

Now, I'll be going back to Alyson's blogs list and finishing my tour of bloggers to love!

Try Two Point One

The Colorist
New School Color
Casey Klahn

Now compare this one. Thanks, Kristina!

Two Point Oh

Let's try this one, with a Colorist American landscape in there, instead of an abstract. And, with a white frame.

Is the whole graphic presentation more coherent?

New Tagline

The Colorist
New School Use of Color
Casey Klahn

Your responses are requested. I am re-tooling and re-working my website, and this collage resulted in an effort to post a descriptive image of my blog. The word "Artspeak" in the old tag line was a stumbler for many - especially because I use a lot of artspeak, myself!

Anyway, the goal has been to communicate my art philosophy in process. The less "wordy', the better, I feel. What are your critiques of the collage, and of the tag line: "New School Use of Color"

New Look

It's a new day at The Colorist. Since my art is mostly "sold through", I get to begin the process of finding my direction anew. Do I have more "colorist" works in me? If so, what will the focus be? I have a number of ideas, including advancing the blue-centric series, and creating a series of works based on a new color wheel that I am dreaming up. Then, for the future I am thinking of a yellow series.

While the market has a say in my direction, I very much feel that the direction I will take won't be slaved to it. The new directions have more to do with artistic seeing, based on spending a lot of hours looking at my works hung together at the art fairs. I loved the newest set of all blue works, including Blue Wandering, which is now featured in the "stuff" column at the right of this blog page.

It has been so long since I functioned these template tools, that I have forgotten how to format jpegs to "fit" properly. After a few failures, I discovered a very cool detailed view of the image, which you see as a tall image there that I'll entitle "detail". I think I'll leave it up for a short while as a good example of some scratch marks, and scumbling details of my technique. Enjoy it while you can.