Words of Wisdom: Clausen on Color

The rules of drawing are fairly definite, and we may claim to know what constitutes good and accurate drawing ; but it is not at all easy to define in what good colouring consists.  One cannot go further than say that it must be harmonious, and that it must convey the impression of truth to nature.  One can tell bad colouring at once - that the colours are untrue or discordant ; but the limits within which good colour is possible are as wide as the range of emotion or temperament in man.  Any artist will paint things as he sees or feels them.  If he has succeeded in expressing some truth or beauty, it will be recognised and felt by some among the many who will in time see his work.

Nothing in nature is actually the colour that we see it.  It only appears to us at a given moment as a particular colour in relation to other apparent colours which surround it.  Thus we may walk out on a rainy evening when the sky and everything is grey, and come indoors and light the lamp, and immediately the sky which we see through the window appears as a beautiful and tender blue, though there was no trace of blue in the sky a minute before, when we were outside.  The change is produced in our senses by the colour of the sky taking its place in relation to a range of warm colours in the lighted room.  In the same way the presence of a man with a lantern, or a light in a window, will apparently change the colour of things in its neighbourhood, and a mass of any strong colour, such as red, blue, or orange, will suggest its complementary colour in surrounding objects. (There is a curious exception to this in the case of lilac or bright violet, which, instead of suggesting its complementary colour in surrounding things, appears to diffuse its own colour over them, so that we seem to see a suspicion of violet in all other neighbouring colours.)

We must realise, then, that each combination of colours we see presents and forms a problem of its own.  I think this was a difficulty not present to the older painters, who-- perhaps wisely-- seem to have ruled out, or not troubled about, many subtleties that worry us.

The range of colour that we possess-- from white to black-- has been proved sufficient to express the utmost range of colour or light in nature, from the sun itself in the sky to the deepest gloom.  Yet our range of pigments is nothing like as wide as the range in nature from light to shadow.  It is wide enough to enable us to paint, to the point of absolute illusion, an object receiving light in a room;  but not with actual light added. For example, one might paint the portrait of a man, with a white shirtfront in full light, which would be white, or nearly so.  But if he wore a diamond stud, the light from this-- a reflection of the sky-- would be much too bright for our colours.  In such a case it would become necessary to sacrifice the stud, or to paint the man and the shirt down to it.  It would become a question for the painter which thing he considered the most important, and in this way either a light or dark version of the man might be true, and both might be equally beautiful, but on different grounds.  One may imagine this difference of point of view between Millais and Whistler in their portraits.  The same kind of question arises if we paint a landscape-- whether to sacrifice the ground for the sky, or the sky for the ground, or both for figures, if we introduce them;  and the solution is the same-- that the colour of the particular part one wishes to be the principal must determine the colour of the secondary things.¹

¹George Clausen, Six Lectures on Painting, 1906, (E.P. Dutton & Co., New York), pp. 48-51.