Dr. David Briggs has been teaching classes on colour for more than 20 years, and currently teaches colour, drawing and painting at the National Art School and the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.  For links and resources related to this episode, please see the Chromosphere episode webpage.

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I interview painter Jeremy Szopinski who is a good friend and longtime studio mate. For more information about the podcast and Jeremy's artworks, check out this website link.

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The final episode of Season 2; includes a correction to the Mary Gartside episode from Season 1. The first version of this episode erroneously stated a connection between Mary Gartside and the writing of Johann von Goethe. This new episode was recorded as a correction and published on April 24, 2023.

Mary Gartside was a painter, teacher, and color theorist who lived in England from 1755-1819. More information about Gartside can be found at: The Winterthur Museum's Program in American Material Culture, Sussex Research Online, and Medium.

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Part one of a reading of an essay I am writing, Focal Points and the Roots of Abstraction.

Human color vision adapts to the changing environment in many ways. Pupils dilate and constrict in order to regulate the amount of light entering the eye. The lens either bunches up or flattens out to change its shape while focusing light wavelengths along the spectral band at different proximities to the retina. Cone cells, and other light sensitive cells, perform plus-or-minus gains in activity to achieve what is known as color constancy, allowing humans to maintain a persistent perception of colors within changing light sources. Adaptations such as these take place at different rates of time, some more quickly than others; some more involuntarily than others, which may relate to how focal points form and dissipate within a visual field. This essay explores how adaptations of the visual system may generate focal points, and how representing light as colors informed the roots of abstraction.

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Are nearly all the cars and trucks in your area either red, white, gray, or black? Discussion of red colors pairing to neutral colors as a color scheme.

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A review of a listener letter.

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A walk through the grocery store in search of the analogous split-complementary color scheme as well as other palettes.

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Part 3 of 3: The final installment, A New Canon, places the work of color theorists, Mary Gartside and Emily Noyes Vanderpoel in historical context so as to examine how their inclusion (and by extension, additional underrepresented color theorists and practitioners) may help us to understand how we may expand our contemporary approaches to color usage in all creative visual fields. 

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Part 2 of 3. In this episode, I read the middle portion of an essay I have written, which could become a chapter in a future publication.  (Read in three parts.)

Abstract:
This essay charts how the term harmony came to be used by European and North American artists, designers, and educators as a qualitative descriptor of color usage and design. Originating in metaphysics and philosophy in BCE Greece as a method to link the functioning of the five senses, including color vision, the concept entered into the vernacular of design via architecture during the Italian Renaissance. Throughout the 19th and early 20th Centuries, theorists and educators claimed the authority to define objective harmonies in color usage and design; forming methodologies that have been ubiquitous in practice over the past 100 years. 

The final section of the essay, A New Canon, places the work of color theorists, Mary Gartside and Emily Noyes Vanderpoel in historical context so as to examine how their inclusion (and by extension, additional underrepresented color theorists and practitioners) may help us to understand how we may expand our contemporary approaches to color usage in all creative visual fields. 

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Part 1 of 3. In this episode, I read the beginning of an essay I have written, which could become a chapter in a future publication.  (Read in three parts.)

Abstract:
This essay charts how the term harmony came to be used by European and North American artists, designers, and educators as a qualitative descriptor of color usage and design. Originating in metaphysics and philosophy in BCE Greece as a method to link the functioning of the five senses, including color vision, the concept entered into the vernacular of design via architecture during the Italian Renaissance. Throughout the 19th and early 20th Centuries, theorists and educators claimed the authority to define objective harmonies in color usage and design; forming methodologies that have been ubiquitous in practice over the past 100 years. 

The final section of the essay, A New Canon, places the work of color theorists, Mary Gartside and Emily Noyes Vanderpoel in historical context so as to examine how their inclusion (and by extension, additional underrepresented color theorists and practitioners) may help us to understand how we may expand our contemporary approaches to color usage in all creative visual fields. 

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show