I used to be one of those people who, when visiting a museum, might exclaim, in the presence of a Jackson Pollock all-over painting, or a Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square: “a kid could do that!”
“A kid could do that”
In a modern art critique class at the University of California at Berkeley, we studied three artists over the course of a semester.
- Malevich painted a white square on a white canvas.
- Mondrian painted primary colors.
A Worthy Understanding of Color and Composition Through the Lens of Malevich, Mondrian, Pollack and Finally Bauhaus’s Josef Albers and his Legacy Carried on by Dick Nelson
3. And Jackson Pollock, he painted all-over.
In spite of my deepest efforts to understand,I got a “C” on my first paper. What made this art great?
Was this all bullshit?
The Teacher’s Assistant, finally, exasperated, said to me directly:
“Stop, just stop, stop thinking, stop writing and just look.”
I remember feeling exposed as the Teacher Assistant applied discipline to my curiosity.
As a class, we visited the Berkeley’s Art Museum. Lucky to have a single Jackson Pollock in their collection, while referencing me (as I must have seemed striving to understand abstract art) she instructed:
“Tell me where one stroke of color from his brush ends and another begins.”
Spend enough time in study of, well, nearly anything, but in particular, Abstract Art, and you will inevitably deepen your appreciation and be struck by a sort of perceptual awakening.
It happened to me, on a bench, at the New York MoMA, I stirred inside, absorbing the original “Autumn Rhythm”.
I sat in awe, alone, on the bench, surrounded by paint strokes and color.
“Tell me where one stroke of color from his brush ends and another begins.”
Despite what truly felt like a mystical experience, what I deeply wanted was reason. Why? Why was this art great?
I graduated, I traveled, I rode a business wave and then jumped, unabashedly into painting with great success: multiple gallery showings, 1 million visits to my website, and a patent filed on optical encryption.
I created my own abstract expressionist paintings, and while my admiration for the masters increased, I could not explain a methodology or reason for the mastery.
I still wanted to know why. What made this art effective? What made my own paintings work?
And then I met the Professor.
“finally getting it”
Dick Nelson, Hawaii’s own color master had been making color arrays in Adobe Illustrator. He had already evolved Josef Albers’ color course into the digital age, but it occurred to him, what if color arrays were rendered in two dimensions, as a matrix.
A decade after falling in love with Jackson Pollock’s art, years after beginning my mentorship with Dick Nelson, I found myself in Amsterdam, at the Van Gogh Museum, staring at a painting that was part of a visiting exhibition.
The painting was famous, well lit, surrounded by people, while a docent spoke eloquently about its source’s mastery, but all of that was background noise to me.
That sun, that sun was so brilliant, it seemed to dance in my eyes.
I’d been immersed in studying color relationship; how to create luminosity in a painting using halation and vanishing boundaries. But I had never seen something this vivid. I felt like a cliche, looking behind the wall for the wizard who was lighting this artwork from behind.
On my way home to Hawaii, a stopover in New York, and a meandering visit to art galleries in the Chelsea district, I happened upon a book called “Vision and Art, The Biology of Seeing”.
The first page I opened showed a picture of the exact painting I’d seen with the vibrant sun, along with a scientific explanation for the occurrence of luminosity.
One hundred and fifty years after the Impressionists, neuroscience was explaining the magic.
Color is science and art, it is emotion and math.
It is a vivid, metaphorical dance between wave and particle.
Color behaves in ways Newton could delineate (it’s real, material, physical, in the world) and Goethe could abstract (our mind’s interpretation is vast). Nevertheless, most people are missing something beautiful that is right in front of their eyes.
Can you really see? Are you really looking?
Monet had made the orange sun match the luminosity of the purple sky.
If we could lead people to see how Monet created luminosity with color, perhaps they would appreciate, they might stop and actually see for themselves.
I returned home committed to the notion that we could share this insight with the world.
Abstract art was not childish nor just intuitive, color perception — whether aesthetically harmonious or clashing — is based on a set of laws.
Color relationship is nothing new, at least in the last 150 years, but it is not understood.
Color grammar is wildly misunderstood
I created The Colorbox, an interactive art installation, that traveled around the Hawaiian islands, inviting people to step inside to experience color relationship with their bodies. I made a website that has received 1 million visits.
Returning to his studio in Maui, overlooking the sweeping valley so flat it could disappear beneath the ocean, he applied every lesson in Albers’ course, using only the color matrix as allowable colors, and found every lesson was possible. This was the Rosetta Stone of color theory.
I asked, “What if we scrambled the matrix?”
The result is Huedoku, which makes the Rosetta Stone of color theory into an interactive experience.
In May of 2016 and I returned to The Netherlands. In tow, along with Dick Nelson’s genius, the guidance of Bevil Conway, a world leading color neuroscientist, on our advisory board, we present our greatest effort yet to share not just the magic of seeing color in it’s full luminosity, but also the understanding of how.
Find us on Twitter @huedoku and join the Huedoku conversation on facebook. Download Huedoku for iOS, the original color puzzle. Become a beta tester and create your own Huedoku Puzzles from colors in your photos, optical encryption, with Huedoku Pix beta.
Bringing it back to the first order, honoring Monet and his insight to match the hue of his sun with the value of his sky surrounding, here’s what happens if we make a black and white version of the first image you saw in this post:
