The Journey Into Color, Pt. I

When I was a boy, I spent hours gazing at desert sunsets that painted the deeping sky with vibrant and ever changing hues. I was spellbound by the symphony of feelings that welled up within me as I watched the way that turquoise gathers along the ribbon of infinity narrowly visible along the horizon. The soft colors there would darken into fantastical hues as the hem of the sun's bright robe disappeared beyond the lip of the world, taking with it the brilliant blue of day and the whiteness of its mountain clouds. I watched the mixing of colors in sunsets as nameless hues of fire mingled with the turquoise while the stealthy colors of the night crept across the twilight sky, gathering up the spent embers of gray clouds whose fire burned but for a moment, smoldered in ruddy pinks, and then, in but an instant, turned to ash.

As the seasons came and went I watched the colors of the mountains. Spring was a quick sunrise, summer a palette of warmth too intense to look at, autumn a sunset of yellows and reds, and winter a monochrome of stillness. I sensed the tempo in nature's use of color. There were volume and mass as well (much like the voices in a choir) in which some hues were spread by the broadest of brush strokes in painting the sky or the barren land or the forests, while other colors were painted sparingly with the fine tip of a sable brush for moments of intense emotion like flowers and aspen leaves and sunsets.

My childhood was plagued by asthma, which my parents were told derived from allergies. Extensive tests produced a breathtaking list of substances and consequent prohibitions. Strange as it may seem—and it sounded strange enough at the time—one doctor actually announced that in addition to everything else proscribing my childhood, I was supposedly allergic to the color red; not a particular kind of paint, mind you, but the hue itself.

Whether or not it is even possible for a person to be allergic to a color I cannot say, but there was enough potential difficulty with the array of substances involved in oil painting that my overwhelming desire to paint had to be confined to watercolor. However, without training of any kind, I treated the small color cakes that came my way as though they were oils or tempras, but without either satisfaction or success. The result was that I returned to the drawing set I had received as a birthday gift when I was four years old, and contented myself with graphite as a medium and a pencil for a brush. Attempts at colored pencils proved as disappointing as watercolor, and I settled into the task of trying to push a pencil as far as a pencil could go.

(Pencil drawing above, Chateau D'Aigle by Al R. Young, copyright 1983. All Rights Reserved.)

As the years unfolded, schooling, family, career, and other demands continued to make oil painting impractical. I had long since overcome the problem of allergies. Perhaps I outgrew them, but, in any case, I remember finally having to decide whether to survive or get on with life.

I did not know that traditional training in art typically began with the rendering of subjects in monochrome, in order to refine a person's skill in expressing form and tone. Yet as I look back on those years I have come to realize that time and time again I was faced with expressing a full range of thought and emotion in a very narrow spectrum; not to mention the narrowness of the finely sanded point of a no. 9 pencil. The practice gave me many opportunities to refine compositional skills as well as skill in representing forms and textures. And while I drew in monochrome, I lived and dreamed and thought and felt in color.

There also came a time many years ago when I read widely about color theory and perception. And although I may have learned much more than I realize, I learned that I did not want to know the names of colors, nor yet the math of formulas by which to organize them. The uses of such endeavors are legion and worthwhile, but I wanted, instead, to interact with color itself for purposes I could not articulate.

Color theory, at least in my experience, is helpful in creating paintings in much the same way that linguistics is helpful in terms of writing: If one needs to talk about language, linguistics is invaluable, but it doesn't necessarily make for better writing. Reading good writing, having something to say, and then working one's heart out in an effort to say it make for good writing. It has been that way for me and color. Absorbing color, particularly in nature, wanting to express something involving color, and then working my heart out in the attempt is what it comes down to.