Exaggerating colour within painting

'Colours become charges of dynamite. They were supposed to discharge light. Everything could be raised about the real.'  Andre Derain 1904-07

Andre Derain, Turning Road at L'Estaque, oil on canvas, 1906

Within this blog entry I am interested in the fashion in which artists have exaggerated colour as a painterly device and have considered the impact this makes on their paintings.

les Fauves ("the wild beasts"), were a group of early twentieth-century artists whose work was emphasized by the use of strong color. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and André Derain (1880-1954). Matisse used liberated colours in an unnatural and non-representational way to represent his subjective vision and state of mind conveying sensation over likeness.

"The chief function of color should be to serve expression as well as possible. I put down my tones without a preconceived plan. If at first, and perhaps without my having been conscious of it, one tone has particularly seduced or caught me." Henri Matisse, from "Notes of a Painter"

 

Henri Matisse, Olive Trees at Collioure, 1905

 The effect that this subjective use of colour has on the paintings of Derain and Matisse is to form a disconnect between the subject in the case of the two examples the landscape and our preconceived idea of what the landscape should look like. Within my own work I have frequently used exaggerated colours as a way of disconnecting the subject from reality.

 

Richard Wade, Contemplating the Inevitable, oil on canvas, 2012

'You reason color more than you reason drawing... Color has a logic as severe as form.' Pierre Bonnard.

Piet Bonnard (1867-1947) and Peter Doig (1959- ) are two artists who both share an affinity for dreamlike, hallucinatory and foreign realms created by painting. Colour plays a prominent role within both of their paintings. The colours of Bonnard's paintings vibrate with a blinding, hallucinatory quality. Working from watercolor sketches he painted largely from memory, separating the painting from the initial experience of reality. Many of his paintings demonstrate well-worked surfaces in order to recreate recollections and feelings about a scene.

Pierre Bonnard, Violet Countryside, oil on canvas, 1946

 'He (Pierre Bonnard) manages to use colours that are exaggerated, but don't look psychedelic. They exist within the realms of a reality we can understand... he's using his imagination. And he's trying to paint things that he's remembered or things that he can see in his head. And I think if you think about what things look like when you try to remember them, they don't look like photographs, they don't look like reality.' Peter Doig

Doig's colour is splattered and dripped onto the surface of his paintings. The paintings appear to correspond to the optical-mental experience of psychoactive drugs altering the perception and the mood of the scene being depicted. Doig describes the experience as 'like being absorbed in the landscape.' 

Peter Doig, Blotter, oil on canvas, 1993

 “disconnecting both the signifier and signified from their purported referents in the phenomenal world—simultaneously bestowing upon us a visceral insight into the cultural mechanics of language, and a terrifying inference of the tumultuous nature that swirls beyond it.” David Hickey, from air guitar.

One may also say that Doig and Bonnard similarly utilize source material for purposes of distance from the original subject or experience. Doig uses reference or found photography, whereas Bonnard worked from sketches and memory.

The common thread that unifies all of the artists I have mentioned in this blog together is the idea that colour if used in an exaggerated or non-representative fashion has the effect of disconnecting the reality of the situation from its painterly representation. As a result imagination and memory may play a much more significant role with the paintings becoming more of a dreamlike conveying emotion over resemblance.