Учебно-методическое пособие для студентов специальности «Дизайн»
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Text 3 By 1820 Turner had begun to organize his work colouristically on the ba- sis of the ‘colour-beginning’, a method which began with watercolours, but which by the early 1830s had also become his standard procedure in oil. It is a procedure closely associated with Turner’s work in series, of which the “French Rivers” is one of the finest, and certainly one of the most sustained examples, where the painter worked simultaneously on many separate images, taking each of them to completion through a series of stages; and this serial process was also applied increasingly to oils in the 1830s. The ‘colour-beginning’ divided canvas or paper into large areas of distinct colour, sometimes pure and sometimes surprisingly bright, and these areas had little direct connection with the nature of the objects which were to be repre- sented. The colours which came to be chosen were for the most part the three subtractive primary colours, yellow, red and blue, which Turner felt were an epitome of the whole of visible creation. As he wrote in a lecture of 1818, yel- low represented the medium (i.e. light), red the material objects, and blue, dis- tance (i.e. air) in landscape, and in terms of natural time, morning, evening, and dawn. In common with many artists of his generation Turner was fasci- nated by the idea of discovering an irreducible number of elements in nature and art; his interest in primary colours is matched by a belief in the underlying geometrical simplicity of forms. That tradition in the understanding of colour in France which runs from Chevreul to the Neo-Impressionists was essentially perceptual; it concerned itself chiefly with optical functions; Complementary colours acquired a special status because they are ‘objectively’ the colours of light and of the shadows cast by objects placed in that light, and because they are ‘subjectively’ the colours of after-images, of those pairs of colours which seem to be demanded by the natural functioning of the eye. Nothing is more indicative of Turner’s lack of concern with this aspect of colour in nature and in perception than his adaptation of one of the earliest colour-circles to arrange the ‘prismatic’ col- ours in a complementary sequence: the circle devised by the entomologist Moses Harris about 1776.Turner used this circle as the basis for one of his lec- ture diagrams in 1827, but he denied precisely these complementary functions of colour in favour of those traditional functions of value: light and dark, day and night. Turner’s abiding interest in the symbolic attributes of colour is clear 118 from the series of small paintings, conceived in pairs, which he produced in the early 1840s, and of which the best known is “Shade and Darkness: the Evening of the Deluge”, and “Light and Colour (Goethe’s Tlieory): the Morn- ing after the Deluge – Moses writing the Book of Genesis”. In these two paintings, with their convoluted iconography, Turner was concerned first of all with the capacity of colour to convey an idea, rather than with the sensations of darkness and light. Turner’s insistence on the essentially symbolic value of colour in nature is bound up with his belief that colour and light are substances, a view which was presented to him in a number of literary sources from the Renaissance and the late eighteenth century. It must have been a particularly attractive notion to a painter whose handling of his materials, whether in watercolour or in oil, showed such a delight in their substantiality. Light in his paintings, and par- ticularly the disc of the sun in, for example, “The Festival of the Vintage at Maçon and Calais Sands”, is rendered by a thick impasto of white or vermil- ion, ‘standing out’, as one commentator on the “Regulus” of 1837 put it, ‘like the boss of a shield’. One of Turner’s sources, Edward Hussey Delaval, also suggested that the production of colours in animals, plants and minerals was analogous to the procedure of the watercolourist (extended to oils in Turner’s latest practice), which functioned ‘by the transmission of light from a white ground through a transparent coloured medium’. The idea that all the colours of the visible world could be subsumed under the three primaries, red, yellow and blue, was also of se derived from the painterly experience of mixing mate- rial pigments, rather than from an analysis of the prismatic spectrum, and all these notions allowed Turner to resist the conclusion that colour, even as it is perceived, is simply a function of the action of light on surfaces. Gage J. Turner as a Colourist // Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism. University of California Press, 2000. P. 164–167. жүктеу/скачать 0,79 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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