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 19th 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.

Also of interest

• Color and color mixing (20)
• Chroma Cluelessness Syndrome (9)
• The kitchen sink palette (7)
• Practical color mixing 3: chroma (4)
• Practical Color Mixing 2: Hue (0)