I didn’t get a chance to read about Hans Hofmann too much today. I am familiar with his work. I like it a lot. My mother took me to see a Hofmann show at the Museum of Modern Art once in the 1960s. I must have thought his work approachable, because Mom told me that I said, “Mommie, if you give me a paint brush, I can do that.”  Ah… youthful exuberance!

Today’s experiment:

Approach:

The theory is old hat by now. Everyone seems to accept that cool colors (i.e., blues and greens) recede into the distance and warm colors (i.e., reds and yellows) advance into the foreground. I’m fairly certain that my sketch today is something that has been done before. I wanted to try it myself, though.

My thought was to mix three primary colors together to get a neutral gray, use it to wash my watercolor paper with the exception of certain shapes that would be blocked by latex resist. After drying, I would then apply one of the colors to each of the three shapes.

The idea was to be able to see, in pure form, the recession or advancement of the primary colors.

Implementation:

Latex resist:

I have a small bottle of liquid latex that is starting to go bad. Instead of being liquid, it is more like a gel.  I had no problem applying it liberally to my paper. It was fun using my finger to swab it around.

Background wash:

I had planned to mix Phthalo blue, Lemon yellow and Cadmium red in equal measure to get my neutral color. I squirted out a blob of each color in a row. I used my wide brush to pick up the unmixed colors. I then had a brush with red paint at the top followed by a section of yellow paint and blue paint at the bottom. When I drew my brush across the wetted paper, I got red, yellow and blue stripes.

The thought occurred to me to leave the background red at the top, neutral in the middle and blue at the bottom. In a typical landscape, the blue would be at the top, assisting with the illusion that it would be further distant than the foreground. I completed my background leaving red at the top and blue at the bottom.

I reversed the process in coloring the blank shapes. I painted the shape in the lower right corner of the picture, red. It is superimposed on the receding blue color of the background.  I painted the circular shape a light blue. This cool color is superimposed on the advancing red of the background.

The triangular yellow shape spans the background from the top (red background) to the bottom, where the background is more on the blue side.

The neutral grayish brown on the lower left contains my thumb print. This has nothing to do with the design of the sketch except as an homage to the painter’s palette.

Comment:

Perhaps it would have been better to have made the background gray instead of the creating the multi-colored, variegated. It would have been a simpler experiment, with fewer variables.

I’m not sure what I demonstrated in this sketch. The red shape certainly seems to come forward. However I can’t decide whether the blue circle recedes. If so, wouldn’t it create the illusion of  a hole in the red background?  Generally, I like contrasts set up between the continually varying background and the pure colors of the shapes superimposed thereon.