Nils Volker

During one of our lectures David spoke about bringing in old toys that are different bring colours and doing an installation with these. This peaked my interest, so I decided to have a look into kinetic sculptures. I had a look on pinterest to see if I could find anything quirky. This when I came across Volker who had this wonderful installation piece.

The installation consists out of 72 so-called Hoberman spheres hanging in the middle of the exhibition space. The mass-produced children toys are made from countless interconnected colorful plastic levers and can expand itself to a multiple of their size. Each one is moved by a servo motor and individually controlled by a micro-controller thus organic waves appear to move throughout the space although each single plastic ball simply expands and contracts at the right time.

I particularly liked this piece as it brought back childhood memories when I used to have one of these. I love the bright colours and the way some of the them are open and close at at different stages.

I also like how they cast beautiful shadows onto the walls around them they look really unusual.

Embroidery Hoop Three

I made another hoop this time I chose to use a square again but this time I chose to do the same stitching technique as the triangle. I  had four different shades of purple threads. I started with the lightest first and worked my way around the square and moved on to the next corner with the next shade of purple and continued to do this for all the four colours.

I do like the way this hoop has turned out the way the threads have overlapped has given it a 3D feel almost an optical illusion. I think this look on the hoop works the best out of all the previous ones. The shaped that the threads create when they are overlapping look really great.

If there was one thing I would change next time would be the order in which I have the threads. I would start with the darkest colour first and then go to lightest. This reason being you can’t see the other colours through the last thread with is being so dark.

Embroidery Hoop

I had a go doing another embroider hoop this time I chose to do different shades of yellow as I only had three different shades at home I thought a triangle was the most appropriate shape to put the yellow thread into.

Here is the start of the triangle. Here I have already added two colours to it. You can’t really tell as the first two colours are very similar to each other. As you can see from the image above I have chosen to go from each corner this time and gone around the triangle, rather than going from just the one corner and all the way around.

Here is the finished embroidery hoop. The last colour was more noticeable as it’s a much darker yellow more of a golden colour. I do prefer the previous hoop to this one the colours aren’t great with this one as you can’t reallt see the change in them and also the shape I much preferred the square. What I do like much more is the way in which I have stitched the thread. I like the pattern it has created afterwards. I might be a good idea to try this stitching technique with a different shape maybe try the square again and try different colour, even if it is the greens again.

I think it will be rather interesting to create another hoop but maybe looking at the colour wheel with the six primary colours and add a circle and do an embroidered version of the colour wheel.

Science of Colour

Intro into science of colour 

Long before colour vision has been understood, painters were able to prepare and to mix colours to achieve the desired effects, and to create magnificent tableaus. This shows that colour science, i.e. the knowledge of the physiological and physical conditions of colour vision and colour generation, is not very important for the artists. Nevertheless, artist painters have consistently tried to find colour theories helping them to understand the essence of colours. But even when their theories were wrong or faulty, this was hardly harmful for their work and that of their scholars.
For the development of colour photography, colour TV, three- and four-colour printing, however, colour science has been essential. Colours had to be measured in order to be reproduced; the development of measuring methods and apparatus was paralleled by the investigation of the visual system. Today a picture taken with a digital camera may be printed with a good inkjet printer yielding excellent results. This would not have become possible without the scientific foundation of colorimetry.

Strangely enough, most people, painters in particular, are not familiar with the principles of colour vision. Colour theory for artists often does not go beyond the misleading colour wheel and colour mixing scheme of Johannes Itten. Itten’s colour wheel and mixing scheme

The colour stimulus

Colour is carried by light, electromagnetic waves, but the sensation of colour is subject to many other influences, which makes its quantitative description difficult, to say the least.
For colour measurement, therefore, one uses “free colours” (or aperture colours), a structureless viewing field, and the only question is whether the two halves of the field are equal or not. This eliminates all additional clues we might get on the “true” colour of the object.
The light reaching the eye is called the colour stimulus. It is characterized by the spectral function which describes in physical terms its composition of radiation of different wavelengths.

Optical illusions, colour constancy

As the illumination in general is not uniform, the perception of gradual changes in lightness is suppressed, while abrupt changes which in most cases are important for the perception of shapes, are enhanced (“contrast”). What is of interest, is the shape and the “true colour” of an object, where the vague notion of true colour may be defined as the colour seen under “normal” circumstances at daylight. The colour stimuli depend on the illumination and on the absorption properties of the things which we see. Their colour should not change when the illumination changes, and the visual system involves a lot of data processing to eliminate the influence of illumination on the perceived colour as much as possible.
The result of the data processing which is delivered to conscious perception is, so to say, the best guess of automatized (inconscious) evaluation routines on the shapes, colours, and distances of objects, which usually are quite reliable. Estimated 40 % of the brain are involved in vision. After the stimuli received by the eye are transformed to neural activity, everything which is likely to be due to imperfections of the eye or otherwise identified as “junk” is filtered out and is not seen. We do not see the shadows of the blood vessels in the retina which the light has to pass before it reaches the sensitive layer containing the cones and rods. Every visual signal which stays constant when the eye is moving is suppressed.

 

Contrast enhancement is strongest for abrupt changes of lightness – nice examples can be found in the internet, e.g. lightness demonstrations, while colour contrast is not so striking. But nevertheless, the colour produced by the same stimulus may even be named differently, depending on the surroundings:

                           

 What before a dark background may still be perceived as orange, appears brown on a white background. Click on the pictures to enlarge them! The effect is seen most clearly if the enlarged image covers the whole screen

                                  

Remitted light from the surroundings is part of the illumination. In a room with pink walls a white sheet of paper would be pinkish, but our visual system accounts for that by shifting the impression slightly towards the complementary colour (green in this case), so that the resulting impression is still “white”. In the case of flat images, this shift may be considered an optical illusion. – The two squares are coloured with the same grey, but the left one appears to have a greenish hue, the right one looks slightly pink.
After-images (see below) also contribute to colour contrast.

All the information here I have taken from this website to help me better understand the science behind colour.

https://www.itp.unihannover.de/fileadmin/arbeitsgruppen/zawischa/static_html/introcol.html

Embroidery hoop

I started looking at embroidery and colour. I have brought a few hoops and some material to try a few things out. I wanted to create something like Nike Savvas but in my own unique way. I wanted to look at using embroidery hoops rather than a 3D version like Savvas has done.
I wanted to look at the different shades of colours like we have with the colour strips. I already have a variety of different embroidery threads that I am able to use.

I chose to use a green as I had a range of different shades of this colour. I decided on using a square as it was a quick and simple way to see how this will turn out. I was going to use a hexagon or pentagon but this would take too long and I just wanted to see if it’s something I want to pursue.

Here is some photos below of my progress so far with the embroidery hoop. I decided to go from one corner and work my way around the square.

These were the first two colours I added. I chose to go from light shades to dark shades. I really like how this is turing out and would like to explore this more. Maybe looking a different ways I can stitch the colours into the square. I could also look at changing the shapes and seeing how that works. There is a lot of possibilities to doing this little project.

Here is the finished outcome. I am really pleased with how it has turned out. I love the way the colours just merge and shows the relation of colours just like we did with the colour strips in the first week. There isn’t as many colour but it is a good sample of what we were trying to achieve before.

I do want to try and experiment with this a little further just to see if this is a possibility to use for a final piece.

Week 2 Progress

When I came in I had a quick talk with David as I have already been inducted into the screen printing and the dye lab so I felt it was necessary to do these classes. I decided to stay in the fine art space and play around with some of the colours we had been making the week before. I had a place with painting card, cardboard, wood and soft modelling stuff which was rather interesting. I spent most of the day doing this trying to get as many different colours I could together so when I experimented with them I had alot of choice and mixtures of colours.

When I came in on the Thursday I couldn’t find any of my paper that I had painted. This didn’t matter but I didn’t have time to be painting any more, so I brought a pack of coloured card and cut this into different sized strips and different shapes to have a play around with, as it wasn’t something I was looking to pursue I just wanted to test out different colours together in a creative way.

I made them like paper weaving to see how the colour interact with each other. Here are some of the samples I did.

 

I wanted to experiment with different colour to see which ones work best together and would consider using these to create a final piece later down the line. I really like using the primary colours together as these are what create all the colours possible. I always like the complimentary colours aswell because of the reason that they make each other stand out a lot more.

 

I tried different combinations to see if changing the direction made a difference to the colours. from horizontal to diagonal. These were the results of that experiment. I am happy with some of the results.

Evaluation of Thursday

I have really enjoyed

Nike Savvas

 

Savvas has many focus point which include  aesthetics, memory, politics, the body, spatiality, identity, presence and absence, high art and low art, colour and systems logic. Coupled with this diverse terrain, the expansion of painting in the age of the post-medium condition has opened my practice to a broader experiential zone of physical and sensory immersion. While remaining open to new influences, I seek to create experiential objects and environments to captivate, transform, and transport the viewer with works ranging from small free-standing objects to immense multi-sensory, kinetic installations. Often manifesting in series, and drawing inspiration from multiple sources, the work often conflates manual detail with colour, optics and system logics, and, in this, conjoins the tangible with the abstract.

I really love this work of his because of the element of textiles it has to it. The image below in particular I really love as it reminds me of embroidery but in the 3D form which I find really interesting. I like the range of colours used and how in every piece made he always has these bold range of colours. It would be interesting to see what I could do with this idea in an embroidery hoop.

Artists & Designers

Victor Vasarely

Vasarely is known as a ‘grandfather’ of the optical art movement.
The image below is ‘Banya’ a piece he made in 1964. As a starting point for this piece such as circles, squares placed diagonally, rhomboids and ellipses were punched out of paper squares of a fixed range of colours from which corresponding shape had already been punched. This made possible vast range of permutations within a compositional structure of uniform horizontal and vertical rows.

Hella Jongerious

Here is a piece by Hella Jongerious called ‘coloured b-set’. Hella likes to explore how colour is affected in the 3D form rather than just on a flat surface. I.e paintings and textiles.
She is also interested when adding light to her pieces to see how the colours respond to light. I really like how this piece has the contrast of natural colours to the one bright colour.

Jean Pierre Yvaral

Jean Pierre Yvaral is a optical artist and a kinetic artist. His father is Victor Vasarely.
He used computers to digitally process and manipulate images, but the final piece was always hand painted. He used this technique to produce a number of portraits including the one on the below. These images became abstract art, yet the original image remains recognisable. I love his use of colour and shapes that created these abstract compositions.

Sarah Morris 

Morris is best known for her abstract paintings, that feature bright colour fields and graphic lines, Morris often referencing elements of architecture. With Morris’s work I particularly love her use of bright colour even when she introduces shades of black and grey, it brings the bright colours to life. Again the use of shape and the placement of each colour is interesting.

Terry Winters 

Winter’s is a painter, draughtsman and printmaker whose nuanced approach to the process of painting has addressed evolving concepts of spatiality and expanded the concerns of abstract art.
In Winter’s work, abstract processes give way to forms with real word agency that recall mathematical concepts and cybernetics, as well as natural and scientific worlds.

 

Relational Colour

Then when we came in on the Thursday we put all of them together, as before David had divided us into four groups who each had to produce a set which meant there were four multiples of each colour strip in the class, it was really interesting to see them all together and seeing how people had painted each one differently.

We continued with the colour samples, then he wanted us to mix three off the paints we had made so far to make a sludgy grey colour and also to try and make a really black black, but I didn’t get around to this part. Then we had to choose one colour (I chose orange) that we had made, cut it into equal size squares and stick it over the top of four other colours, like this…

We then did a colour experiment where you stare at one of the little squares, I chose the orange on the blue, you stand up close to it, stare at it for 20 seconds then immediately look at a white wall and you see the reverse of the colours! so I saw a blue box surrounded by orange! we then matched squares with their complimentary colours to see if the colours where brighter against them.

Then those that had black picked out the strongest colour in it, say a green black, then put that corresponding colour on top, so you would then put a green square on top of the green black

Then finally David asked us to select a pot of pre mixed paint (I chose orange) paint a strip, cut into squares and place on top of two colours. then noticing how the orange looks different on the two colours, we had to to adjust the paint accordingly to match what our eyes saw, for example…

It was really interesting to see how much a colour can change by just placing it over different colours. I really enjoyed this exercise and was alot of fun trying to make the colours we saw.

Relational Colour

On our first day in relational colour we looked at how there are actually six primary colours, phthalo blue, ultramarine blue, cadmium red, magenta, cadmium yellow and lemon yellow and how say the lemon yellow is cooler so goes on the blue side and cadmium yellow is warmer so goes on the red side, here is a photo below to show the colours

Then we looked at the complete colour wheel with greens and purples etc and talked about how the science of light which was rather interesting but was rather confusing but I sort of understand it.

After I had completed my colour wheel we moved on to paint fifteen colour ways into strips, just using the 6 prime colours. We were divided up into group and each had a set of colour strips to produce. This made the process much faster than attempting to do all fifteen. These are the ones I completed

Once all our group had finished we pinned them up against the wall to see what the finished outcome was. I was really happy with the result of our colour stripes.