Awash in Color: Roy G. Biv and Friends

Philipp Otto Runge's Farbenkugel

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I came across this nice post about color wheels and globes in Steven La Rose's blog. He showed a great image and provided a link to a German-language site about historical color systems which I followed, thinking I'd pull a different image for this post. Well, Steven selected the best one. And I'm not going to settle for second best, so I've pulled the same one. I love how the artist conceived the color wheel as a globe, with the true colors at the equator moving toward tints and tones at the poles.

Here are a few others images:

Two color pyramids: Tobias Mayer's Farbendreieck, above

Johann Henrich Lambert's Farbenpyramide, below, tints you dimensionally toward white as the pyramid reaches its apex

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Wilhelm von Bezold's Farbentafel is more conventional, but still quite lovely

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While we're talking Roy G. Biv, let me show you images of several contemporary artists for whom color is the primary element: Steven Alexander from Pensylvania, Kate Beck from Maine, and Rose Olson from Massachusetts. Consummate colorists all, whatever theory they learned was absorbed long ago, and what emerges now is its pure intuitive application. (See more on their own websites and blogs, accessed by the live link on their names.)

Steven Alexander, Slave To Love, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 54 inches

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Kate Beck, Canyon. Red, oil on canvas, 46 x 46 inches

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Rose Olson, Falling Sky, 2005, acrylic on bird's eye maple plywood, 35 x 22 inches

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What, and you thought I wouldn't include my own work here? Roy G. Biv is a close buddy of mine, too. These are two new small paintings from "Silk Road," an ongoing series of small grid-based color fields. I wrote about "Silk Road" in my first post for this blog. The work has developed incrementally over time, but my thoughts about it have not. It's always about hue.

Joanne Mattera, Silk Road 106, above, and Silk Road 103, below; both 2008, encaustic on panel, 12 x 12 inches

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