If you’ve had a look at any of my art, you can tell right away, “This guy loves to use lots of colors.”
It’s true, I do. My landscapes and critter pictures are filled with bright synthetic colors that you would never see in nature. My nudes and portraits use broad splashes of color to highlight emotional states like anger, boredom, or lust. And of course, my abstracts are a playground for light, shapes, lines, and lots of colors.
At the end of the day I want my art to by MY art, and the way I can do that is to go a bit crazy with the color.
In other words, I view color as a super important tool used by artists to convey meaning, and it’s definitely an aspect of making art that really hits deep with me personally.
In fact, one of my core memories as a kid involved the use of color. There was this one time where my dad provided a bit of art criticism that sorta just affected me for years to come, whether he really knew it or not.
Here’s the scene: I was sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of crayons and a coloring book. I was maybe six or seven at the time. It must have been after dinner because I remember my mom was washing dishes, and the lights were on in the house.
I was busy just coloring away at a page that had a dog on it, running around in a park. I remember it vividly. It wasn’t just any kind of dog, it was a Golden Retriever. I was just having lots of fun, going to town with the crayons.
My dad walked by and stopped suddenly, staring down at what I was doing. At first I thought he was interested, and I stopped coloring to look up at him, hoping that he would approve (as artists, we all have that need!).
But instead of saying anything positive, he said, “That’s not what a dog looks like. There are no purple and red dogs. Have you ever seen any dogs that look like that?”
I mean, I was only six or whatever, so what did I know about dogs and their possible colorations that I might encounter in the world? I’d only seen a very small part of the world at this point, after all, and the only dogs I knew where the two dogs we had (Boots, who was black with white boots on his legs; and Rusty, who was, you guessed it, rust-colored) and a few other mutts in the neighborhood.
But of course, the only response you could have to an authority figure at that age was something like, “I dunno” or whatever. He just walked away shaking his head, and left me with no clear understanding as to why he was so visibly disappointed in me and/or what I was doing, but the sense of his disappointment, and his dismissal, was super clear to me, even at that young age.
The tyranny of realism, I learned later, would extend to other artistic approaches I would take. In high school, when I picked up photography and started experimenting with f-stops, odd angles, and taking close-up pictures of rain hitting a cracked window (for example) and ended up with artistic, filtered, and crazy-looking photos (that I had learned to process myself in the high school dark room), his criticism was always centered on “well that isn’t a realistic photograph; the world is in focus and lined up, not all crazy looking.”
Fun, right? By the way, anytime I talk to other artists and ask them about the whole “representational vs impressionist vs abstract” thing, a lot of them will tell a similar story about the pressure they felt to make art that was super realistic all the time. Whether this line of thinking comes from professional art critics, a well-meaning family member, or anyone else, doesn’t matter. It sucks and the people who push this line need to stop.
So…to that tyranny I say phooey.
Part of what makes art art is resistance: to norms, to ideas of right and wrong, to rules, to whatever authority figure who says your mountains have to look exactly this way or that you have to show the world exactly as a machine would record it.
So I guess at the heart of it, yes, I do love color, but I also love that color can evoke a reaction, set a mood, or just make the viewer look at the depiction of a scene in a totally different light.
So to all artists I say, go wild with those colors if you want. Stake out your own visual language. Say what you wanna say. Put that artistic middle finger up. Resist.
