Chromosphere: The Color Theory Podcast: Recent Episodes
Ed Charbonneau
This podcast centers on my research and understanding of color, color usage, and optics as they relate to theories of human color perception in the making of visual art and design. By Ed Charbonneau, an artist (drawing & painting focus) and adjunct faculty member in the Fine Arts Department at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. (Content expressed does not reflect the views of the Minneapolis College of Art & Design.)
The final episode of Season 3. A reflection on the past three seasons.
The Book of Colour Concepts, Alexandra Loske and Sarah Lowengard, Taschen 2024
Color Theory: A Critical Introduction, Aaron Fine, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021
Magenta + Green = Blue? Instagram video reel
Black Flag, TV Party, 1982
Please find more information to each episode on the Chromosphere website.
Interview with Gamma Jeanne; a departure from our more in-depth discussions of color theory. Jeanne's career as an artist spans over nine decades and includes working with acrylic paints in the 1940s and being at the center of department store design in the 1950s. Our conversation is wide-ranging as it addresses an artist's inner drive to create and form connections with people.
Relevant links:
The Terrazzo JungleBy Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker March 7, 2004
Victor Gruen; Gruen Associates
Southdale CenterEdina, Minnesota, USA
Gruen (formerly The Gruen Transfer)
Australian Broadcast Corporation
Please find more information to each episode on the Chromosphere website.
CNN online article: Wear red and green to experience the Purkinje effect during the total solar eclipse
Please find more information to each episode on the Chromosphere website.
Luanne Stovall is an artist and color theorist with an MFA in painting from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She attended the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture (New York City), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, Maine).
Luanne is a member of the Steering Committee of the global Colour Literacy Project and a visiting lecturer in the School of Design and Creative Technologies at the University of Texas in Austin. Currently she is teaching Color Literacy as an upper level interdisciplinary course in the School of Design and Creative Technologies at the University of Texas at Austin.
She has taught color courses and workshops in many locations including UT Austin, The Contemporary Austin; School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Wellesley College, MA; and MIT Sloan School of Business. Her paintings and works on paper have been exhibited widely, and are in private and public collections, including the Art Museum of South Texas; El Paso Museum of Art; Blanton Museum, Austin, TX; Moakley Cancer Care Center, Boston; and the Estee Lauder Collection.
Luanne’s website:
https://www.luannestovall.com/
The Colour Literacy Project, Steering Committee member:
https://colourliteracy.org/
Inter-Society Color Council, Board of Directors member; Team leader, Fluorescent Fridays
https://www.iscc.org/
2023 International Colour Association (AIC), volume 33,
Special issue on contributions by the Colour Literacy Project Team:
https://aic-color.org/journal-issues
Luanne's contribution to the 2023 AIC volume 33:
Prologue: one artist's journey from traditional colour theory to the Colour Literacy Project (PDF)
University of Texas Color Literacy course
Designed as four modules:
- Color Perception
- Color Interaction
- Color Psychology
- Color Design / Portfolio Project.
University website: AET Courses (Search under the Upper Division tab.)
Flower Color Theory, by Darroch and Michael Putnam
Please find more information to each episode on the Chromosphere website.
A conversation with artist, Suyao Tian exploring her process as a painter and her personal approaches to using color. Please find more information related to this episode here.
Please find more information to each episode on the Chromosphere website.
A conversation with Jon Rieschl. Please find additional resources to this episode here.
Jon Reischl is a visual artist and designer specializing in mixed-media and oil painting. He has shown work locally in the Twin Cities and the greater metro area as well as regionally at venues throughout the Midwest.
A graduate of St. Paul’s College of Visual Arts (RIP), He works out of Rock 9 Art Studio, located in the heart of the Creative Enterprise Zone. Jon lives on St. Paul’s East Side with his lovely wife Debra and their trusty beagle.
Please find more information to each episode on the Chromosphere website.
Sebastián Wilson is a photographer living in Santiago, Chile. He studied architecture which has a clear influence on his work both on the graphic sense, and on the way he observes and portrays light. For links and resources related to this episode, please see the Chromosphere episode webpage.
Please find more information to each episode on the Chromosphere website.
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.
Please find more information to each episode on the Chromosphere website.
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.
Please find more information to each episode on the Chromosphere website.
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.
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.
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.
A walk through the grocery store in search of the analogous split-complementary color scheme as well as other palettes.
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to Season 2!
This episode features a correction on the first episode of Season 1, followed by the continued investigation of how red, yellow, and blue became known widely as primary colors.
The final episode of Season 1. I explore whether or not there are more variations of color within the hue of green; more than those of the other hue color families. Thank you for listening to Season 1!
Discussion of the impact of telescopes on the development of color theory. Also linear & aerial perspective in relation to depth and space, and what any of that has to do with the newly-launched James Webb Space Telescope.
Discussion of the work of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel and her book, Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color, of 1903. Discussion centers on where I see her concepts in relation to those of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers.
Discussion of additive spectral color mixing and how our perception of purple may be the result of our minds experiencing a negative green.
Discussion of how afterimages occur when the cones of the retina tire and weaken due to overstimulation, allowing other cones to briefly play a more dominant role in vision, and how that lead to the establishment of complementary colors.
Discussion of Arthur Schopenhauer and Phillip Otto Runge's ideas about color vision and color harmonies, and how they may have impacted the teaching of color theory at the Bauhaus art school, in Germany in the early 20th Century.
Discussion of the speed of light, polarization, glare, mirages, and what any of that has to do with Michelangelo. (See cangiantismo and shot silk.)
Discussion of how our perception of blues and greens remain strong in low light, and how that may have impacted the use of lapis lazuli (and other blue pigments) prior to the invention of the electric light bulb.
Why did Homer repeatedly describe the color of the ocean as wine-dark in the Iliad and the Odyssey? Could the sky have been purple or violet in the days when Helen and Achilles lived in mythological Ancient Greece? Discussion will focus on the possible ways in which the ocean could have been similar in color to that of a nice Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir wine.
In Zur Farbenlehre (A Theory of Colours, or, A Doctrine of Colours) of 1810, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe worked to dismiss Newton’s findings of the nature of spectral light and sought a return to Aristotelian views of color. Why no love for Newton? This episode reviews Goethe's theories and how he introduced psychology to the understanding of human color perception.
“A great mathematician [Newton] was possessed with an entirely
false notion on the physical origin of colour….” - Excerpt from A Theory of Colours.
Also known as vibrating colors or scintillating colors. Discussion of the chromostereopsis effect will explore how colors are perceived in 3-dimensional space, even when located on a 2-dimensional picture plane; how reds advance and blues recede.
Given the properties of color (hue, value & chroma), do value contrasts work to form the most effective focal points? This question is addressed in relation to color vision's adaptability to view contrasts in hue and chroma over those of value and brightness. Also, could our vision as babies affect how we perceive value contrasts today?
Have you ever noticed that the color of sunlight changes throughout the year? It is thought that this is due to our shifting perception of a color known as Unique Yellow. Discussion will center on how this phenomenon occurs.
Is black plastic recyclable? Check out the World Economic Forum for more information on how it is recyclable, but rarely recycled. This episode focuses on a potential color theory explanation as to why it is that black plastic is used frequently as food packaging.
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.