The Chromosurrealist Manifesto
When it comes to colour there are two types of people: those who think primarily in colours and those who think in shades of grey. I'm a natural tonalist, like any classicist, but for every visual artist the mastery of colour is essential. More than just duplication of nature, control of colour is control over the psychological action of colour, both its feeling and its symbolic representation.
What is colour in a painting? Objects can be literally painted. What colour is the sky? Light blue in the day time, yellow at sunset, black at night. What colour is a tree? Brown and green. What colour is any object? It depends on the atmospheric and reflective conditions, the colour of the light shining upon it, the materials the object is composed of. Objects then can have a literal colour, assuming the light is white.
Problems begin when the imagination suggests alternatives. What if the sky was painted green? Or red? What if the skin here was blue? There are too many options, and that creates difficulty. Sometimes I have painted a picture and liked it only to grow to dislike it, and sometimes disliked a picture upon completion only to grow to like it. The "true" pictures were the ones that survived, ones that represented one idea with clarity. Transient feelings of what is attractive are not reliable. As ever, feelings must be rationalised.
Colours can also be symbolic. Pink and dark green represent a rose, and a rose love and other things. Light blue can symbolise the sky, freedom and heavenly calmness. Violet and black symbolise death. Thus; colour itself can be a surrealist object, capable of stimulating the mind. Baboons are driven mad by red. Green is calming. Pink, invigorating.
Irrespective of a specific hue or tone, colour contrast can determine mood. A clash of tones or opposites can represent panic and discomfort. Colours that match are calming. The mastery of colour is vital because a painting must be true, and the colouration must also be true and represent the same message that the symbols and feelings of the picture itself represents.
So what is to be done? Classical surrealism is the imagery of dreams, but the symbology of colours in dreams are more difficult to determine than the symbology of objects or situations. Mentally visualising colour is less easy than visualising shapes, perhaps because forms have a tactile component. Imagining colours comes with practice and experience, just like imagining the sound of a chord as opposed to a melody, it is something composers gradually learn.
I define chromosurrealism as the pure representation of unconscious colour. I am not a classical surrealist however. Automatism, and access to personal symbology and mind states, are of vital importance, but those tools alone are of little use, and to be truly representational it is important to know and rationalise a subject. As such, colouration must be subjected to the same rigorous calculative rationalisation of emotion that imagery is. This is not to belittle any composition as a flight of fancy or fantasy! The opposite is true. As in all things, the ideal of representation is the dream of a mind that lives the idea.
An infinity of options is necessary to transliterate an infinity of ideas, and an infinity of colour choices is also necessary. The task of the artist is to finitise infinity.
A painting dictates mood, and areas of a painting can dictate mood. The first rule is that vivid colours convey a message loudly, and grey and ashen tones are delicate whispers.
The second rule is that hues can be pleasant and synergistic, or dangerous and acidic and that areas of hue contrast are used for this purpose, to create calmness or panic. Areas of tonal contrast (that is light and dark) similarly create a stab of interest and drama, but tonal contrasts have a different visual impact to a change of hue. Perhaps tonal contrast has the impact of the past, and a hue contrast the impact of the future; Neurolinguistic Programming indicates that images seen in vivid colour are readily accepted by the brain, and images seen in black and white, or fuzzily, are rejected. Hues grab our attention compared to greys. As evidence of this refer to advertisements.
The third rule is the rule of symbology. As with object symbols, colour symbols can be local, colloquial, known only to a small number of people, or global, or anywhere in between. Almost all humans recognise red as the most passionate and alerting colour. Linguistic research indicates that the colour red is the first word for a colour that evolved, beyond words for black and white. Red in the context of a bull fight might indicate antagonism, even if it's not true that red excites a bull, the mythology makes red a valid symbol in that context for those who understand the myth. Light blue represents a calm clear sky to all humans, although a danger to any bacteria-based art aficionados! The ultra-violet components of sunlight make blue a deadly hue to many simple life forms, it is for this reason that blue light, particularly at night, alerts us. Nature imparts many colour symbols in its sunsets and plant and animal forms.
The colour of one object can impart its symbology onto another; a sky blue car would give the car qualities of the sky. I associate green with sadness (greens! The curse of many artists) so used this to represent Charlie Chaplin's unhappiness in my unusually hued portrait.
