What red catches our eye?

                                   

cadmium red                          red                                alizarin crimson

Here are three of the reds that we have been looking at. Though colors appear slightly different on different screens, you should be able to see the cast shift between these three reds. The cadmium red is yellower (and therefor lighter) than the medium red; and the alizarin crimson is bluer (and therefor darker) than the other reds.

So how do artists, or any of us, chose one red over another? Well, I believe that we are all acutely, even if subliminally, aware of the colors around us. And the colors we are habituated to are tied very closely to the historical period in which we dwell; the material culture of that period’s society; and our personal color experiences.

 

To take a small example, let’s look again at that warm earthy red that Paul Klee was so fond of using in the 1920’s and 30’s. The painting above is “New Harmony” one of his abstract square paintings from 1936. I am suggesting that that particular red was ubiquitous in the material culture at that time

                           

. All sorts of ephemera-cigarette packaging (Lucky Strikes), book covers (Tarzan), comics (Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang), textiles (this a design by a Russian designer, S. Burylin in 1930)-used that particular red. It was a very Art Deco red and it made its way into Klee’s mind without him being necessarily conscious of it. (This idea is very speculative, and I would love to hear from anyone doing material culture if this has been studied!) I wonder how many other artists have incorporated the colors of their time into their color palette?
To return to the idea of color reflecting different time periods, textiles turn out to be a very good way to track changes in color over time. These changes resulted, in past centuries, from innovations and inventions in the dyes available. Eileen Trestain writes in her interesting color guide to fabrics between 1800-1960, that the earliest red was a medium red called turkey red (see the sample in the header) that was made from the madder plant and had been in use for millennium. It continued to be used until the turn of the 19th century when it was usurped by a chemical dye alizarin that produced a crimson red.

              

You can see the range of colors widening and brightening as the century progressed. And as the 20th century really got going, the changes came faster. Trestain writes that from 1900 through the 1920’s the red in circulation had a slight blue cast. Just a couple of years later, the red gave way to a more brilliant red with an orange cast. Today we can see new colors become contagions in a matter of months.

Those of us who make fashion our business (for tv and movie sets as well as clothing) know how to chose colors that evoke a time period as narrow as a couple of years (think of the changes in color in Mad Men as the 1950’s segued into the ’60’s and then 70’s!) and many of those colors are in the fabrics of the time.

When I was a very small child in the 1950’s, I have a strong memory of my mother wearing deep clear red nail polish and the same red on her lips. She was following the fashion lead of Coco Chanel and the Duchess of Windsor (see the photo to the left of the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor, circa 1940).

Color Action: so to become more attuned to our present day colors- and maybe to discover why we like what we like in colors- let’s return to the color reference library we are building up. (A small suggestion for organizing these references: cut white bristol board to 8 inches x 10 inches. Attach the samples to these boards and slip the boards into 9 inches x 11 inches clear plastic loose leaf files that can be put into a loose leaf binder.)

The printed colors in paint stores as well as the matte colors in the Pantone books show red in only one type of material. But if you look for samples of reds in the ephemera of today, you will notice how different the same red looks in grosgrain ribbon or satin fabric or newspaper circulars, or glossy fashion magazines or nail polish. Some reds seep into the fabric and attain a depth and brilliance that cannot be matched in color chips and some are in velvets that change depending on what direction one looks at them.

You may have noticed that I have not mentioned the most usual place to find color,and that is online and on screen where images in brilliant color inundate us daily. But more on that in next week’s post!