Color Use in My Work

This is a recent question I received about color.

"You have used color extensively in your own work will you share some of your personal preferences?"

The ways to add color are many and varied. Some of these methods are able to work together effectively and some are not, primarily due to the nature of the mediums in question. For example you can not add watercolors on top of dried tempera paints as the moisture would disturb the underlying medium of tempera.

I've always been adventurous with art tools and love to find new ways of approaching image making. My color favorites include, watercolors, Conte' pencils, acrylics, colored pencils and with computers-digitally. Other methods I have used in the past and still do when needed are, oils, pastels, gouache,tempera, casein, alkyds, markers, crayons, watercolor tins, watercolor pencils, enamels, colored inks and colored dyes, fingerpaints, airbrushing, spraypaint and colored ball point pens.

I've been attracted to colors since I was a kid growing up in the 1960s. Plastics were able to accept vivid highly saturated colors at this point-in-time and toys came in many vivid hues. When I was about 5 years old we bought a large color TV, going from black and white to color
was huge in impacting my young mind. At first I thought everything that was filmed in black and white was from the past and apparently before color had been invented.(In fact the film that I made sure to watch annually, "The Wizard of OZ" was filmed in color decades earlier, unbeknown to me at that time.) I later realized that was a wrong assumption but found it funny when my kids came to a similar analysis
when they encountered black and white films for the first time at a young age.

Needless to say Saturday morning cartoons and all the great 60s TV shows that started filming in Technicolor over the course of the decade(as opposed to the cheaper black and white) literally blew my young mind. The NBC peacock was truly spectacular and worthy of watching
each time it appeared as far as I was concerned. Or the CBS chimes that followed the brightly colored letters with the voice over stating,"Filmed in Living Color" (not to be confused with a FOX TV series by the same name that followed decades later).


Shows like Hogan's Heroes, Bewitched, Gunsmoke, and the Beverly Hillbillies went from one season in black and white to the next in color and it seemed like they had leaped into the future. Meanwhile shows like the '60s Batman and Green Hornet played up primary colors found
in use in comics and that was my other huge are a of influence, comic books and comic stips. The dynamic use of primary colors in comics. I loved the black and white line work when I could see it printed by itself but the color comics really brought life to the medium. One reason why Sunday Funnies are always bigger draws than the smaller black and white dailies in the comic strip sections of our newspapers, is that spark of life the color adds.

Finally my teachers in elementary school exposed me to fine art at the capitol building in Little Rock, Arkansas on field trips. There I encountered my first color field paintings along with other abstracts that just focused on color.
Ever since then I have loved using color, weather it be full color or something as simple as a monochromatic scene.