Wednesday 24 October 2012

Discords at 8 o’clock: Gavin and colour

My first experience of teaching colour theory was done alongside Gavin Stuart. He had a set of colour notebooks, full of complicated formula which he had developed over the years and which he referred to as ways to develop particular types of colour harmonies or discords. I found it very difficult to understand at the time and invested a lot of time and energy trying to sort out what was going on.
I shall attempt to unpick my understanding of what he was getting at.
Students would start by mixing oil colours and would begin applying them to their sheets of prepared paper. Nothing could happen until there was a certain amount of coverage.  While students were engaged Gavin would instruct me into the arcane arts of colour.
Gavin seemed to have several ways of thinking about colour, which were laid one over the other in order to achieve the necessary tension that would create a colour ‘happening’. The first was based on the Munsell colour system. This system is a way of thinking about colour relationships within a sphere. The central axis of the sphere would have white at the top and black at the bottom, (tonal value) around the outside it was divided around the equator by hue (primary, secondary and tertiary colour) and the slices that ran from the central axis to the surface would be saturations. (colour purity).  This meant that around the equator all colours would be of a mid tonal value and at the North Pole colours would be light tints and at the South Pole dark tints.
A slice taken through the equator would in effect give you a color wheel, but one restricted to mid tonal values in the centre and full saturations of hue around the edge.
If the colour wheel was thought of as a clock, you could then identify colours as to time, for instance yellow could be at 12 o’clock, red at 4 o’clock and blue at 8 o’clock, if you wanted a more precise measurement, you could use the 3600 of the circle to identify specific colour hues.
However Gavin had another overlaying system, which was that there was something called ‘normal pigment value’.  I.e. a yellow was normally seen as a bright colour, but a blue would normally be much darker. I.e. the natural full saturated tonal values of each hue on the colour wheel are different, yellow being a lighter value than red and violet being even darker in value. Positioning within the colour wheel (sphere) coupled with unexpected tonal value, was where Gavin’s number system came in. He was very interested in discords. His definition of a discord, was that first of all the tonal value of a particular hue would be taken away from its "natural" value. For example, blue, being a naturally dark valued hue would have to be mixed as a very light value, for example a powder blue. Whilst yellow being a naturally light valued hue would be mixed as perhaps a mustard. The now unexpected tonal value would be placed next to another colour, so that their expected tonal values were reversed. E.g. the powder blue adjacent to the mustard yellow.
In my first teaching session Gavin had asked me to pick out 8 o’clock discords, I of course didn’t know what they were. I was shown the powder blue- mustard yellow as one, but others could be found at any 1200 angle relationship.  This was where his colour notes came in. He had worked out all sorts of mathematical permutations of possible discords, based on split-complementary colour schemes, the rectangle (tetradic) colour schemes, or his square colour scheme. These were schemes that allowed you to choose specific colours found according to an imaginary triangle, square, or rectangle that you placed over the colour wheel. One combination I remember would point towards lavenders being brought together with very light pinks, the discord chosen from what I remember, should be built around the primary colour which is closest to the colour identified within a composition as one that needed working on or adjusting. For example, if the student has an orange patch of paint that isn’t working, or feels ‘dead’, the closest primary hues to orange are red and yellow. As you can't have a light discord of yellow since it is already naturally light in value, you would choose a pink as a starting point. Now apply the pink mix and push it into the orange or push it alongside it, let the one expand alongside or into the other until you find a satisfactory relationship.
This push of one colour into another was vital. Colours had to find their own form and expansion. Put a violet patch onto a white surface. Initially it will read as a dark. Keep spreading it and at some point it will sing violet. Do the same with a yellow and it will sing at a different expansion.  This aspect of the colour session was very close I always felt to the expanding blob experience. (See growing the blob post) Watching and keeping note on how one colour changed another was very important. 
Most of the students used palette knives, colour had to be mixed really well, knives cleaned between each colour mix, ‘cleanliness’ of mix with no dirty left over bits of colour was insisted upon. The shapes as they grew were organic. Initially responding to the white, as other colours started to surround first put down ones, initial decisions would have to be re-visited. Sometimes colours would have to be scraped off, Gavin seemed to really love this part. He always remarked that Alan Davie was good at this, Davie according to Gavin, often scraping off everything except for one small area and then telling the student that this was the only bit working. “Now”, Davie would state, “re-build the whole fxxking thing from there”.  (Gavin like Davie was from Edinburgh and they had got on really well when Davie was a Leeds University Gregory Fellow and teaching down in the Art College). 
The interesting thing for me was that students did indeed come up with very beautiful colour mixes. I was never sure they understood any of Gavin’s theories, but they seemed to get there simply by making good clean mixes and having something to aim for that forced them to use colours outside their comfort zones.  Above all they had to look and look hard.
Colour as it was taught on Foundation was something everyone seemed to have a strong opinion on. So I shall return to this several times. It caused much confusion amongst students, as the staff had many and very different hymn sheets. I was initially just learning, so would soak up anything that came my way. At least I’d had a traditional grounding in basic colour theory, so could begin to sort out the various approaches, but for students I’m not sure what they took from this, except for the belief that if you were intense and totally involved with looking and mixing eventually the colour would work.
The key to all this I felt was a story Norbert Linton told me about when I met him once. Norbert used to be the college librarian during the time Harry Thubron was in charge. Harry would make all the staff join in with sessions, believing that everyone should be part of the experience. Norbert had spent a day away from the library making colour squares; surrounding one colour with another, trying by applying different mixes to optically adjust the same neutral colour by placing it within warms and cools, alongside saturated and de-saturated mixes etc. At the end of the session Thubron had a crit. He never once mentioned the colour, all he spoke about were the various ways that the oil from the paint had spread out and soaked into the paper surfaces. Linton was inspired by this, aware for the first time that for an artist the moment of looking was always paramount and that the focus was on what was interesting not on what people thought the situation should be about. There was always something else, something unexpected to see, something magical in even the most basic exercise.

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