Since I use common material like wood and perspex, I found it’s problematic when many in the group work on the same material. Not like painting or drawing, the material itself becomes a main part of the visual presentation for viewers to perceive artists’ work. Besides what I want to retain in my work, practical making could be read as a whole. Same kind of material in sculpture sometimes can be seen as the same work if there’s not much significant difference in understanding and treating materials. So I wanted colour back to my work for the identity of them. Even with the same colour palette, painting element conveys more than just which colour to choose, by hue, density, surface, the use of painting tools, the way of execution and so on.
I approached colour as material for building structure rather than defining illusion of form as I do on memory. Donald Judd, Josef Albers, Jessica Stockholder also treat colour fusing with the surface as material. Similarly, for Paul Klee, colour seems principle compartment to structure pictorial composition. Furthermore, in the relation to space, structures with colour make more sense than without colour for my work since my inspiration starts with perceptive and sensuous observation.
“Colour is like a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell.” –Roland Barthes
Also, artist’s talk about the origin of sensing colour in sight by scientific cause is touching for me, which made me consider colour in different aspect more than the colour match.
“For the first 200 million years that life existed on Earth, there was no eyes……
The eye exists in order to sense light. Light in the absence of eyes illuminates nothing.
Visible forms are not inherent in the world but are granted by the act of seeing.”
-Simon Ling, unpublished notes for talk at Goldsmiths, 5 Dec 2012
-Artist Talk with David Batchelor and Briony Fer at Waddington Custot: Colour is
5 April 2017
It was interesting as David Batchelor opened the talk with the different aspect of colour inside/ outside of art scene.
Colour is related to sensual experience from the infantile moment of perception. It is also ornamental and always relevant to make it hard to rationalise. However, art world tries to make a cognitive approach like abstract expressionism worked on colour to know the world through.
Courtesy of Waddington Custot. Blue Cell, by Peter Halley, 1999; Dubhe, by Paul Feeley, 1965; and Colour Chart 58, by David Batchelor, 2012
-Work process in colour
Sometimes specific colour and the origin of its pigment are interesting matter as in the past, artists used to be intrigued by ultramarine extracted from Lapis Lazuli and the emerald colour of Absinth. For me, the green shade is always exciting to see in both still and moving image in the light and shadow. In painting and film, the nature colour turns into the colour of decay; it creates the mood of space for the self. (Pierre Bonnard); it becomes a mere shadow in a long take; it becomes the fleeting movement in the sunset. (Tacita Dean, The Green Ray) In the Korean language, there is a term called “Puruda” meaning both green and blue even there are also separate terms for each blue and green shade. I suppose that comes from the perspective of seeing sky, sea and mountains in a landscape as a whole rather than seeing their boundaries.
Consequently, I chose the green shade for the main object. On the condition that plywood is very absorbent (which was the tricky matter for Judd in his colour), I had to decide either I go for a varnished surface with opaque colour or natural surface with transparent colour. I adopted Klee’s method than Judd’s because I didn’t want to lose plywood’s beautiful surface.
Green shade – Key colour - phthalogreen & manganese blue
Phthalogreen is transparent colour and there is an option between yellow and blue shade. So I assumed it would work with clear blue on pale plywood and it worked well.
Warm shade- Key colour- magenta, titanium white, and cadmium yellow
A little bit of cloudiness in the warm shade needed for balance in the whole composition. I added white in clear warm colours to make it less transparent.
To apply colour on the surface, using painting tools didn’t make expected result on a surface. So I came up with dipping into colour directly like dying fabric. It was problematic to find containers for big pieces of wood. I made portable plastic containers from a sheet of plastic to fit for different size pieces of wood.