Think Colour

Think Colour: Art is Never Just Black & White. Porirua City, New Zealand: Pataka Porirus museum of arts & culture, 2001.

In Maori cosmology, life evolves from absolute darkness, the intense night, the deep night, the dark night. From the wind, and the rain, and the intense energy, come the first signs of light -- the rising sun. From the rising sun, the wind, the rain, and the energy, comes the personification of the dawn maiden -- bursting into light, into colour, to embrace her mother, the planet earth. From the world of light -- come al living things. Colour, like music, transcends all cultures and barriers. It is a universal form of communication, and like its primeval parent the sun, it warms the heart and soul. Darcy Nicholas

Exhibition catelogue for "Think Colour" group exhibition in the Pataka Museum of arts & Culture, 28 October 2000 - 18 February 2001. This publication brings together New Zealand painting colourists and investigates these questions:

- What lies behind New Zealand's passion for black?
- Why do artists eschew strong and vibrant colour in favour of a restrained palette
- Why has black become such a significant colour in New Zealand painting?
- Can it be that our passion for black, which is so intimately associated with our national identity, is reflective of a lingering puritanism, an emotional reticence in our national psyche?

1704: Opticks.

Sir Isaac Newton observed that light passed through a prism refracts into a scale of colours.
Scientist Thomas Young discovered that primary colours [red, yellow, blue] could be used to create all the colours in the solar spectrum [the colours of the rainbow].
Eugène-Michel Chevreul established as scientific 'laws' that (a) 'contiguous colours influence and modify each other'; and (b) each primary colour is intensified optically by its complemetary. The principles of harmony and contrast of colours: and their applications to the arts.

1865 Eugène Delacroix, colour theory
1905 Monet's palette: white, cadmium yellow, vermillion and deep madder, cobalt blue and emerald greed.

'Liberation of colour' - colour as an element independent of subject in its own right.
Art et Critique, 1890. Maurice Denis: '... a picture, before being a horse, a nude or some kind of anecdote' as 'essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.'

See NZ Artists:

• Gretchen Albrecht (b.1943 Auckland)
• Philippa Blair (b.1945 Auckland)
• Jeff Brown (b. 1964 Nelson)
• Matthew Browne (b.1959 London)
• Philip Clairmont (1949 - 1984)
• Max Gimblett (b. 1935 Auckland)
• Rudolph Gopas (1913 - 1983)
• Jeffrey Harris (b. 1949 Akaroa)
• Emily Karaka (b.1952 Auckland)
• Len Lye (1901 - 1980)
• Rob McLeod (b. 1948 Glasgow)
• Milan Mrkusich (b. 1952 Dargaville)
• John Reynolds (b. 1956 Auckland)
• Philip Trusttum (b. 1946 Raetihi)