Beyond the Shadow
Finding Personality in Color
One of my best friends (hi Alex!) recently sent me an intriguing thread from Culture Critic (@Culture_Crit on Instagram or check out their longer articles here on Substack) about the decline of color in favor of more neutral tones. (By the way, have you noticed more grayscale cars on the road lately?)
I have to say, I’m not on the same page as Aristotle here. I’m not any more captivated by grayscale than I am by color; for me, it’s about the emotion art evokes—how it makes me feel—not necessarily what it looks like, per se.
This whole conversation brought to mind a funny incident from my undergraduate days in Rome.
We were in drawing class, sitting atop the Spanish Steps. I had just purchased a small set of oil pastels and decided to add some color to my drawing. When our teacher walked by, he told me I’d be better off sticking to grayscale. Ouch.
“A random distribution of the most attractive colours would never yield as much pleasure as a definite image without color.”
— Aristotle, Poetics
Everyday in class, we would use pencil, pen and ink, or charcoal in this city of a thousand hues of red and yellow. It just didn’t seem fair that every drawing should strip Rome of its vibrancy like that, reducing it to a mere shadow of itself.
I’m guessing this particular teacher wasn’t exactly a fan of Aristotle or Loos. Instead, I think he was just making a not-so-constructive comment about my skills at the time—a rather unhelpful, dare I say destructive, use of authority. And I still think about it, all these years later.
But here’s the thing: he didn’t discourage me.
I love color! I love the way a blade of grass can have six different shades of green and it can take days to choose the correct shade of “white”. The intricacies! The lushness of it all. I’ll never stop exploring and celebrating color.
What about you? Do you love a neutral base with a splash of color in your art, or are you Team Color all the way? Whatever you love, I say go for it—fearlessly! Let your colors tell your story, because they say so much about who you are.