Drawing and Painting in Color [antikvár]

•I, I NTRODUCTION wo things have changed the way color is used in both drawing and painting. One is the idea of beginning with color, rather than structure in the form of line and tone, and making it one of the essential themes of an image. This was a concept which only began to bc explored fully in the late nineteenth century, but since that time, color has been acknowledged as a basic element in image-making, not something to be superimposed as a surface effect. This development was a result of certain artists, notably the Impressionists, finding different ways of looking at the world. To them, it seemed that colors, and the effects of color in light, had a central role in methods of rendering immediate perceptions of form and space. The second factor was related to technical developments in color chemistry: the new synthetic pigments introduced at this time produced a far greater choice of colors for artists' use. This range has continued to increase, which is of great importance to the ways we use color in drawing and painting today. Traditional color-drawing materials such as paints, pastels, and chalks have been joined by a vast array of colored pencils, crayons, markers, and pens which exist simply to be colorful. All these materials are convenient, direct sources of color, and artists in many fields arc giving them increasingly serious attention. Drawing has traditionally been seen as an activity secondary to "major" art forms such as painting and sculpture - a learning method or process of preparation that leads to a more polished visual statement. In this role, it is associated with economy of means and materials - dictionary definitions of drawing lay emphasis on picture-making with line and tone, sometimes identifying basic materials such as a pencil or pen. Some even include the words "without color," and if you look at any large collection of drawings in a book or exhibition, you will find that linear and monochrome techniques are dominant. Color was sometimes employed in drawing in the past, but mainly as a means of decorating or elaborating a monochrome image. The free expression of color values and the contribution of color to an image were considered the natural preserve of painting rather than drawing techniques, but color expression is no longer the preserve of painting. Artists often turn to drawing materials as an alternative-and sometimes preferable - way to tackling difficult color problems. And in the age of mixed media, many of the traditional distinctions no longer apply. i