The Colorist

This year's books review might be smaller than the previous two. On the good side, I did read two double-volume sets with @ 1,000 pages each (@500 pages per book). Well, to be honest I am in the middle of the second Matisse bio, which I started twice. That's the kind of year it's been!

As my closer readers know, I had two operations this year (urology - yiick). This has made me less productive much of the time. Without papering that over, I do have positive regards for the year to report. I haven't forgotten that it was the January opening at the Karlson/Gray Gallery in Langley, Washington, that featured my New School Color pastels, and was a success. New people found my art, and began collecting.

Also, it was last winter that saw the electrification of my new studio, and a whole new chapter of studio life began. I would say that I still have no routine, partly from lack of time. My youngest little schooler doesn't go every day, yet. My being sick, and my wife's more than full time new work project have also been a huge challenge.

All of this to say that I have painted a number of works that I very much like. My plein air paintings turned a corner, and now that skill is becoming part of my repertoire.

Books 2008



The Rape of the Masters, Roger Kimball



The Unknown Matisse, Hilary Spurling




Matisse the Master, Hilary Spurling



Matisse,
By Volkmar Essers



On Painting, Giuseppe Verde (Still on the bookshelf)



I'd Rather Be In The Studio, Alyson Stanfield



Multi-Brand Color Chart Pastels, Marie Meyer



Pastel Painting Workshop, Albert Handell and Leslie Trainor


Outside of the art genre, I read:

An Army at Dawn, Rick Atkinson

The Day of Battle, Rick Atkinson (Get busy on the third one, Mr. Atkinson)


Ideas for my own books to write:

Drawings - Essays & Examples

New School Color - will this be the year for a manifesto on color?

A Portfolio - a catalogue of works

The Colorist - a blog book


On my wish list:

Ordinary Heroes: Six Stars In The Window, Dan Oja.

Atkinson's third book in his victory trilogy.

The famous American, Wolf Kahn, is an octogenarian who lives in Vermont, and has been involved in the New York art scene for over fifty years. His family fled Germany in 1939 to escape Naziism.

He is considered a member of the "New York School", or a second generation Abstract Expressionist, and studied under Hans Hoffman. His art is collected by top tiered American museums, and is represented by several noteworthy galleries, including the Ameringer-Yohe in NYC.

Mr. Kahn's career can be explored through a number of books, including
Wolf Kahn's America and Wolf Kahn Pastels.

My own affinity with Kahn's work has no relation to our name similarity. When I took up landscape painting, I realized that I had an academic understanding of color, but little experience with it. Did I have that natural ability, or knack, for making colors "sing" that some artists have? There was only one way to find out.

I knew, by the way, that my mother had a way with colors. She wasn't a painter, but she knitted and did various other crafts. My own path was to look intensely at Wolf Kahn's works and seek to understand what he was doing with color that stood out.

Also, the flattened perspectives and vertical lines speak to the formal qualities of modern art, which interests me greatly. One trick I used early in my research was to take a color composition of Kahn's, and turn the wheel one color to the left or right and see what could be done. After doing a few paintings this way, I just evolved my own color ideas. Walked on my own, so to speak.

It bothers me not the least that my pastels look much (or something) like Kahn's artwork. He is a noted master, and derivation is the natural path of art. I am interested in the vision of current artists who are focused on color first. What makes them authentic? Is the contemporary colorist work saying anything that the fauves didn't already say?

My pastels are more like Kahn's oil paintings than his pastels. I am interested in the medium of pastel to the extent that it offers some very new and current content to the art world. Kahn's pastels are more in the realm of drawing. And they are the best of drawing - loose, free, formalistic, and new. They do, however, smack of the traditional study-for-a-painting methods that have been a hallmark of pastel work for years. Nothing wrong with that. Drawing is the original art, and must be connected to the past somehow.

New School Color
Wolf Kahn dot Com

Pastel

Pure Pigment, Paste & Passion - Casey Klahn on the Pastel Medium

All of the action is over at my other blog, pastelsblog dot blogspot dot com, due to my "phase" of creating more realist works. That is, rather than New School Color works, you see.

I did create a keeper in the New School Color genre (you know - my whacked out colorist abstracted landscapes) but don't have it photographed yet. I'm waiting to use the tungsten lights and the D-80 set-up for that jewel, since color accuracy is critical in recording these. Even then, I am only just barely satisfied with the image produced. The evil photograph will never replicate the colorist pastel's myriad of colors and values. Even by shining a light through the back, as is done here on the PC screen.

Now, on a personal note, I have been suffering some health problems just like I did @ two years ago before my Italy trip and had an operation. Long time readers remember that business. No cancer, so calm down. Just pain. It's a "man" thing, to steal a phrase.

So, that's why my posts at The Colorist have been a bit thin lately. On the good side, my physician has offered to do an operation in barter for a painting. His idea. On the negative side, the pain and recovery will be weeks. If it's anything like the last one (picture me in Italy with intense pain) it will knock me out of a few art fairs.

It's hard to say if my studio time will be wiped out, reduced, or maybe increased. And blogging may be curtailed (4-6 weeks, but I'm betting longer) or it may be my only outlet for all things art. Who knows?

Anyway, I haven't decided to have the op, yet, so we'll see what happens. It's not every day you get an operation in barter for an artwork, but the dollar value turns out to be equal. BTW, he's the best doctor around and I've had a number of these guys. And, usually, I enjoy pain tremendously, but in this case I may have to take the bigger pain to relieve the long term pain.

Katherine Tyrrell, at Making a Mark and her other web sites, is engaging in a two month long study of colour. I think this will become one of the best organized references available about color on the web. I will be participating by studying the characteristic of "Intensity".

First, some groundwork on color theory.

Of course color is a problematic study. Opinions vary, and dogmatism can be a booger. Artists may be dogmatic based on what they learned in art school. People who use computer-based color applications will be off in their own strange world, adding lights of various colors to their white base. Painters will vary a little from print makers, and the dye-using artists also differ in their color models.

The important thing to remember is that points of view exist, and to keep in mind that you need a point of view that works for you. But, it doesn't hurt to be grounded in reality, either. So, measuring results helps. Science brings us that.

If science gives us conceptual theories, we should also feel indebted to Modern Art for uncoupling artists from the hegemony of visual perception. What I mean is this: I don't care at all how other's "perceive" color, or what the "mean average" is for perception of a given color, What I care about is how I use colors!

Put a different way, there has been much written about the ineffable state of color. Colors are perceived differently from person to person; visual perceptions are the result of mental processes and even psychology; cognitive and computational variances; blah, blah, blah. I don't want to ignore the science, but there is an intrinsic color there in the pigment and it behaves the same from day to day, your "perception" be damned.



My own recent studies of color have me occasionally pitching fits because the dominant paradigm on the internet is based on computer uses of color. When artist's use of color is addressed, it often is delivered through the lens of the new paradigm, and what results is misinformation, mistakes and generally not useful stuff for the pigment user.

In a rare entry of clarity, the Wikipedia on the Color Wheel has this to say:

There is no straight-line relationship between the colors mixed in pigment, which will vary from medium to medium. Whereas with a psychophysical color circle, the resulting hue of any mixture of two colored light sources can be determined simply by the relative brightness and wavelength of the two lights, a similar calculation cannot be performed with two paints. As such, a painter's color wheel is indicative rather than predictive, being used to compare existing colors rather than calculate exact colors of mixtures. Because of differences relating to the medium, different color wheels may be created according to the type of paint or other medium used, and many artists develop their own individual color wheels. These will often contain only blocks of color rather than the gradation between tones which is characteristic of the color circle.

The difference between the artist's pigment "color wheel" and the other color theories is best understood by the different colors anchoring them. Red, Yellow and Blue are the primaries of the pigment user because they cannot be mixed from any combination of other pigments. The science oriented, and the print maker or computer user, will identify some other set of base colors because of how light functions. I want to call that "experiential", and the pigment based paradigm I want to call "elemental".

I also want to wretch when someone wishes to impress on me that the "real primaries" are Red, Green and Blue because of so-and-so's color circle theory, or because of the way one's eye perceives color. Fine, I say. Show me that with paint on a palette!

So much for my color model position. Next: Intensity!

Skip these links if your brain hurts thinking about color as perception:
Qualia - Mind numbing experiential theories including color perception.
Paper on the Ineffability of Color.

In the last month, I have been posting some general information about color theory. The take home message that I tried to bring was that the Internet is prejudiced, or at least heavily weighted, towards the colors that computers are limited to. The color theory ("additive") that the CRT, and much of print media, is slaved to is RedGreenBlue.

Take this post, in particular. In it, I attempt to indict the bias of illuminated screens. Possibly my best support is provided by Jusko's link where he supports my argument for the artist to keep the RedYellowBlue color theory in mind before you buy the RGB/CMYK theories first.

There is nothing "subtractive" about adding one hued pigment to another to create a third hue. Perhaps there is subtraction if you begin with the dominant idea of light-based "mixing" created in your computer or camera.

Theories based on light rather than human perception are what I call "light-dominant" theories. I prefer to think of the experiential side of human interaction with light. Stone age man did not crack a laptop computer, he rubbed colors on stone. BTW, he mixed the pigments in hollowed out "mortars" of stone.

Regarding light versus perception, see the following quote from the Wiki on color:

These physical or physiological quantifications of color, however, do not fully explain the psychophysical perception of color appearance.

Clearly the digital and information era is the dominant paradigm of our day, and art created in the context of this era is every bit as new and legitimate and creative as the "Old School" methods of painting ever were in past eras of history.

But tearing down or redacting the old does no good for advancement. That dialectic is tired and disproven. Painting is the foundation of visual art and must remain intact in it's theories, not re-written or ignored by the newest thing.

The Wikipedia entry on the Munsell Theory has a fine example of the computer's inherent inability to reproduce artist's colors here:

Note that the Munsell Book of Color contains more color samples than this chart for both 5PB and 5Y (particularly bright yellows, up to 5Y 9/20; that is twice as much chroma the 5Y 8/10 square to the left), however they are not reproducible in the sRGB color space, which has a limited color gamut designed to match that of televisions and computer displays.

Now, with all of that in mind, I have found after my series on color theory has been written a new, wonderful resource for all things color theory. See Colour - Resources for Artists, a new Squidoo Lens by Katherine Tyrrell.

Her blurb on the lens is here:

This lens is assembling links to information and advice about colour and how to understand and analyse it as an artist. Also listed are various books concerned with colour.

And for goodness sake, crack a book about color and don't rely on the Internet only! Katherine has listed many books throughout her wonderful lens, and also I would prefer the links that are from artist's paint manufacturers, such as Gamblin. Put another way: just take all Internet sights about color theory with a grain of salt.

Admin Note:

My Technorati Authority did dip to 20 on the wear-out of 90 day old links, but I picked up 2 more links and am now at 21. Probably I had another 1 wear out, for a net gain of 1.

On the positive side of things, I have been listed in the Top 101 Artist's Blogs, apparently on the authority of Technorati. The list is compiled at Laketrees.blogspot. And, I have no idea how she conducts her research to rank these Technorati-listed art site, but as they say, "there you have it".

The popularity of the Abstract Expressionist movement continues today. Although the conventional wisdom wishes to move on, the movement has legs beyond it's supposed demise.

In the light of this, I wish to ask a couple of questions. Why would an artist today wish to identify their work as Abstract Expressionist, when it is considered defunct? Is it actually experiencing a rebirth, then? Do contemporary artists "give a care," as the vernacular has it, whether a movement is alive or dead in order to be associated with it?

Are these contemporaries the ultimate nerds of the art world? Or, are they just blithely ignorant of conventional wisdom, and happy to make art as they please?

My own references to the Abstract Expressionists have been many:

• Helen Frankenthaler (sorry, but I associate you with this school broadly)
  
• Clyfford Still
• Cy Twombly
• Jackson Pollock
• Mark Rothko
• Wolf Kahn ("second generation")
• Lee Krasner

Here are some current blogs closely associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement:

• David Novak
  
• Pollocks the Bollocks

On a related fresh note, the Smithsonian is loving the Color Field movement right now (through may 26th):

• Color as Field: American Painting, 1950–1975
• Hue-phoria

Speaking of color field work, Peter Plagens, at Newsweek, wonders what ever happened to color in contemporary art? Oh please, Palgens! Click on Google and find me, for heaven's sake! If you'd do a little research, you'd see that it is alive and kicking in the New School Color theme.

• A Room with a Hue (MoMA)

Thanks, Martha Marshall, for the Novak link.

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

Here is a special thanks to those of you who voted to choose a new blog banner. The gray banner has prevailed. There were 16 votes for gray, versus 11 and 10 for the brown and green ones, and some sentiment for keeping the old one was expressed.

A new and attractive blog banner can be the most dramatic change for your blog, next to selecting a new template. Yesterday's post presented various types of creative blog banners for your inspiration.

This post will link you to the simplest tutorials I have found for creating and posting a new banner to your blog. I won't touch on platforms other than blogger, except to say that I think the information here on designing and creating your banner will benefit you no matter which platform you use. I will add the following advice that I found helped me. I use Photoshop Elements (version 2!).

1. Determine the size that you want your new banner to be. I experimented with my old one and discovered that 717 x 426 pixels was my preference for a banner in my particular template. When you open a new file in Photoshop, designate the size you choose.
   
2. A helpful hint in choosing a banner size is to find an image that you feel is an approximate of what you want to make and open the properties by right clicking on it. Use that as a starting point, but don't copy - you want to stand out.
3. Notice that a few of the banners I linked make their statement in a small space, about 70 pixels tall. That may be your solution if you want to cut to the chase. Charley Parker's is 593 x 110.
   
4. Why not allow your readers to participate in choosing a banner design by polling them?
   
5. Make sure your finished product doesn't look pixelated, or fuzzy, when you post it at your blog. I suggest that creating it in the right size, by pixel dimensions and by dpi, will do the job. I try to create my designs in a 200 or higher dpi, and then I save them at 110 or so to make sure they look sharp enough. In my (uneducated) opinion, most people's web feeds can support at least an image of 110, rather than the old 72 dpi. Any other opinions on this?
   

Some have advised against big banners, and I sympathize with that opinion. I have gone with a big banner to make a graphic statement and to make my blog recognizable. I have found that there are many ways for readers to arrive here, and usually they have followed a subscription tool, which highlights the image or title of each post. The downside of having your post "below the fold," as Katherine van Schoonhoven says, is not too critical, in my opinion.



How to make a banner and post it:

Blogspot Tutorial
Photoshop Tutorials
Paul Stamatiou
Design Mom (embed code tutorial provided)


Don't forget to have a tag line. I like Angela Taylor's, "I have marks to make." Mine is "New School Color." Many bloggers make the name of their blog fit a tag line, such as "Robin Pucell, Watercolors in the Plein Air Tradition." I think it's important to include your name somewhere in your header, because people want to view and buy art from an artist. An internet nom de guerre doesn't help in building your artist profile.

Keep in mind the overall look of your blog, not just the header or banner. Also, your background color. The Colorist sported a mid-value blue-gray background for the first half a year of its life. When I went to white, the added light was well worth it as far as my art was concerned.





Why I'd never make it as an IT guy.

This Tree School post is a re-write of the one that was originally posted at Pastelsblog in January, 2009.

With a couple of exceptions, every landscape I have done has trees.  But don't expect to see green trees in these pictures.  I want to convince you to almost never use green as your departure point in painting trees.  





The color of your trees will either establish or enhance your overall color composition.  You want unity, and you want a proper color statement.  Sometimes, green just isn't part of that structure.


Green will key the color composition for you. If you wish green as a major element in your image, then use it. If not, then do a color study of your composition first to determine what color you will be making your trees.  The local color of trees is usually green, but if you think about it, there are other local colors of trees. Brown, orange, silver, gray and black are present. Trace or hints of red and blue are very evident to me in trees. Cast colors include violet and blue. When we view our trees in this manner, any color becomes part of the natural palette associated with trees.



Remember that color has much more value than associations with objects. Some assign emotional value to color, but I also think of it's plastic qualities.

Don't become a victim of the tyranny of green.


All images in pastel, by Casey Klahn.
1.   Blue & Gray River  10" x 14.5"
2.   Clear River  7.5" x 9"
3.   Violet & Green Tree  5" x 4.5"

The only thing perfect in the future may be the second coming of the Lord Jesus. All else is shifting sand, as the old hymn declares. Looking back on this past year, I never could have predicted the events that transpired in my artist life. What will transpire in the next year?

I do know the directions that my art will take in the near future. You guessed it: more color! I hear the voice of Tim Allen (Tim the Tool Man) growling, "What this baby needs is more COLOR!!! Awroooh-arrwrr!" My heart and soul is still going that way, and I have yet to discover the last color composition that my pigments have to offer.

New hope abounds for me, especially since the new art studio is suddenly "up", as they say in the mechanic's shop. Not "up & running" yet, though. The running of my new studio will have to be configured on a dream and a prayer. I haven't been in a regular studio pattern for months. Somehow, a lifetime of art habits will have to push to the front again. A little discipline probably wouldn't hurt, either.

I am thankful that my little kids are growing bigger and have interests that only their young childhoods can contain. Somehow I have to shoe-horn in a studio schedule that works on a weekly basis. I can't wait until next year when they will both be at the elementary school and I will have some full days out of the house (and across the yard in the mega-studio).

New opportunities abound. There will be new gallery contacts and the development of the one's I already have. I want to budget for a web designer to take my web site to the next level, since it has started bringing in contacts for me. More artistic development for me in the direction of the figure is at hand.

At The Colorist, my main goal is to tighten-up my writing and themes. The reason for this is that I want to try another self-published book based on the blog and on my Colorist Art. And, I feel that better threads or topics more fully developed may make a difference in the "information overload" environment of the blog world.

The posting of art should become more frequent. I am in negotiations with my photographer to develop a permanent system in the new studio for taking the images.

Interactivity will increase for this blog in the coming year. Do you want to participate in a guest post? Others have pioneered the idea of allowing a guest blogger to have their day in the sun, and I like that idea. The only guidance, I think, will be to fulfill the themes of the Colorist. Perhaps a group of Colorist artists may develop in the near future.

Admin: Thanks to Alyson Stanfield for tagging me. I will be writing my "5 things about me you don't know" in the near future.

The thing about going with a logo, is that you really ought to "nail it" the first time. Maybe that's one thing that has kept me from deciding to field one. But, since this gallery packet project is now officially keeping me up at night, I think the timing is right to "brand" my business mailings.

It's hard, don't you think, to distill a whole body of art into one "blurb" image? So, going out on a limb here, I chose this abstract image that I drew at a workshop a couple of years ago. It very much says "color", and yet it doesn't pin me down to any one of my landscapes. And, at the same time, it is an artwork, rather than a symbol or construct of some letters.

I don't have a background in graphic art, although when I took the Famous Artist's School course (I was @ 10 years old), the focus was on commercial art. It's a whole different discipline than fine art, but there is some cross over.

The Wolf Kahn Project continues with my own subjects drawn and painted en plein air. Before, I was copying directly from the master, but now want to build my own library of content. Dovetailing with the WK Project is my Plein Air Project at Pastel, pastelsblog.blogspot.



The Wolf Kahn Project has been my attempt to learn, or perhaps re-learn, the free and loose drawing skills that I value. What I mean to say is that I had practiced abstracted figurative drawing for many years, and only put my focus on the landscape in recent years. WK is adept at manipulating nature to fit the needs of the picture plane, and I want to grow in that direction.

While I still want to remain a studio artist, there is the need to get out and see nature. If for no other reason than to add to my catalog of objects for my New School Color works. More buildings, more trees, more landforms are what I need.

Admin Notes:

If you follow my studio progress, you'll note that the wood paneling still adorns my walls, and one wall even has insulation peeking through. With my kids home from school with the sniffles, and my own convalescence from an operation, little remodeling has been accomplished! But, the studio is gradually coming together, which I'm happy about.

The same set of stresses has kept these new artworks from getting official photos taken. That will happen soon, but I add these candids for their newsworthiness.

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"

It gives me great pleasure to introduce my newest blog: The Colorist Daily. Original Pastels in the New School Color style, posted mostly every day and many at under $100.

Should I offer a drum roll? How about a theme song? I need a theme song for this. Although this one I found at You Tube is for The Blob, try to imagine it as "The Blog!" It is from my birth year, so I kind of liked that.




Need it more up tempo? Try another from my birth year; this one by Henry Mancini, who always did the best theme songs I can remember.



Man, I love that!

Too out there for you? Nothing says intro better than this one, also from that same year.



Anyway, you get the idea. New, fresh art in small and collectible sizes. The Colorist Daily. Feel free to subscribe or follow.

There are enough inquiries about potential workshops that I need to re-tool my studio and, at least for this week, give more focus to the desktops than the easels.  I have to buff up my workshop lesson plans, and create some flyers and press releases to give you a better idea of what I will be doing.  Preview:  I will be offering a workshop soon in New Jersey, and there is talk of teaching a workshop in Germany.  I may also be doing one in eastern Canada, but the scheduling on all of these is not established.


Looks like this workshop thing is catching fire, and maybe one will be coming to your area in the near future.


Workshop page.

Announcing Pastel at PastelsBlog.Blogspot.com!

Because my tags are top-weighted with the subject of the pastel medium, I felt the need to step this subject out into it's own blog. What's more, there seems to be a demand unmet by the current blog world. I am by no means the leading authority on the medium of pastel, but I am willing to open up a venue like this to cover this popular and growing artist's tool.

Now that The Colorist is close to 1 year old, I want to continue to narrow and define it's direction. This blog is more about process and art than it is about tools and techniques, and so I am splitting out the vast world of Pastels as a stand-alone blog.

So, please continue here for my art process story, the broader world of fine art, and essentially a manifesto* on New School Color. And, for an exciting and growing discussion of all things pastel, please go to Pastel, at http://www.pastelsblog.blogspot.com.

*Manifesto: in art a public declaration or exposition in print of the theories and directions of a movement. The manifestos issued by various individual artists or groups of artists, in the first half of the twentieth century served to reveal their motivations and raisons d‚etre and stimulated support for or reactions against them.