More on chroma

Decker Walker posted a thought­ful com­ment on my recent tongue in cheek post on Chroma Clue­less­ness Syndrome.

I agree that indis­crim­i­nate reliance on high chroma leads to dis­cor­dant, brassy, loud paint­ings. But the alter­na­tive of match­ing the chroma of nature is not, in my opin­ion, the best solu­tion. Since paints have such a lim­ited range of value and chroma com­pared to nature, painters who try to match nature’s col­ors exactly wind up with a dull, dim pic­ture. This is most evi­dent in a clear blue sky. No paints can mix a blue that is as intense and yet as light in value as that sky. Only by selec­tively and art­fully exag­ger­at­ing the chroma rela­tion­ships and value dif­fer­ences observed in nature can a painter approach the color rela­tion­ships we see in nature. I’m not speak­ing here of the expres­sive exag­ger­a­tion of color for emo­tional effect, but sim­ply of paint­ing a real­is­tic pic­ture of the scene before you.

I don’t think there’s much dis­agree­ment between us. My objec­tion is to artists who use high chroma thought­lessly, because they think that a paint­ing that con­sists entirely of intense col­ors is “pret­tier” or more “excit­ing” than one that is more mod­u­lated, or because all of the paints they own are high in chroma and they never learned how to mix them to get a desired chroma.

If I might be indulged in quot­ing myself, here’s what I wrote in an arti­cle on color mixing:

Let me give you an exam­ple. I was brows­ing through art books in a book­store the other day and found one about the paint­ing tech­niques of the impres­sion­ists. It’s a very well writ­ten book, based on lots of research on the indi­vid­ual meth­ods of many 19^th cen­tury artists. There are a num­ber of demon­stra­tions in which the author copies a sec­tion of an impres­sion­ist paint­ing, using the meth­ods of the orig­i­nal artist. In every sin­gle case, through­out the entire book, the author gets the chroma badly wrong and pretty much every­thing else right. In par­tic­u­lar, almost every color is one or two chroma steps higher than the cor­re­spond­ing color in the orig­i­nal. Impres­sion­ists were not known for mak­ing dull pic­tures, but the author felt the need to “improve” the orig­i­nals by bump­ing the chroma, even though she was clearly mak­ing a seri­ous attempt to use the same or sim­i­lar pig­ments and tech­niques. What’s more, I don’t think she knew she was doing it. I think she believed she was doing pre­cise copies, but failed to see chroma dif­fer­ences right in front of her face. That’s just a guess on my part; some of the pig­ments used in the typ­i­cal impres­sion­ist palette were fugi­tive, so she might have been delib­er­ately com­pen­sat­ing for their ten­dency to fade. But if that’s the case, I couldn’t find where she told us that, and she was cer­tainly increas­ing the chroma even in areas cor­re­spond­ing to those painted with light­fast pig­ments. So either the repro­duc­tions in the book are badly messed up (and no one caught it) or this artist has a remark­able insen­si­tiv­ity to chroma.

I see sim­i­lar errors on inter­net forums in which ama­teur artists post copies of old mas­ter works. The chroma is usu­ally too high—often much, much too high. That might have some­thing to do with how the work has been pho­tographed, dig­i­tized, and pre­sented on com­puter mon­i­tors, but in case after case, the posted copy appears con­sis­tently more chro­matic than the orig­i­nal, even when the artist has shown them side by side. The artists usu­ally seem unaware of this dif­fer­ence, and some­times have trou­ble see­ing it even when it is pointed out to them.

Decker’s exam­ple of push­ing the chroma in the sky because you just can’t cap­ture the chroma and value in paint at the same time is an excel­lent one. It makes me think of Max­field Par­rish, who painted skies with high chroma, but never cluelessly.