Patterns in colour
Tangled Garden by J.E.H. MacDonald
When I saw the mountains behind the thimble berries and fireweed that became the subject of my painting Thimble Berries, I remembered the Canadian post impressionist, J.E.H. MacDonald‘s wall of blue purple behind his garden. I don’t think you can say there was a particular colour or colour combination that post impressionists used. They took the Impressionists vivid colours and exaggerated them. They shared the idea that colour could have a meaning of its own or your own. I like the idea that colour has it’s own life and you respond to it.
Thimble Berries by Kent Crawford
These are the colours for Thimble Berries
January 20, 2014
There is a repeating pattern that forms along the edges and intersections of colors and shapes and lines that is a reflectaphor.
A reflectaphor is any creative device (including literature, such as metaphor, simile, pun, paradox or synecdoche) that relies for its effect on creating in the mind of its audience an unresolved tension between the differences and similarities of its terms. In other words, a reflectaphor excites a state of intense wondering, doubt and uncertainty- a sense of nuance. The repeated colour shapes in my brush marks pull out the reflectaphoric qualities of fractals. Fractals are figures that recur at progressively smaller scales, each part has the same characteristics as the whole. Fractals suggest both order and chaos.
Parts of that pattern combine with other similar but different parts to make a bigger similar pattern. It recurs in variations, providing a sense of unity and wholeness. Hokusai uses this pattern in the woodcut Waterfall at Yoshitsune.
West Lake 2 by Kent Crawford
I use this repeating pattern in the painting West Lake 2.
January 19, 2014I layered 29 colours of lacquer ink on paper to make my 1990 screen print Spawning Salmon. Each slide in this slide show is an inking of that print. Each inking took a day to create the screen, mix the ink, pass ink through the screen and let the ink dry. 110 prints were made in this edition.
June 24, 2012
