Assignment 4: Research task 1: 21st century colour

This task is a list of 21st century artists who use colour in various ways. I had a look at their work. I didn’t like most of it. I’ll put a few examples here.

1. Jim Lambie

Basically he covers rooms and staircases in tape. The stairs would be horrible to go up or down, especially having had a drink or two. They seem designed especially to make people fall down them. Howver, there is something pleasing about the exactness of the shapes created by the tape.

Jim Lambie https://www.themoderninstitute.com/artists/jim-lambie

Jim Lambie https://www.themoderninstitute.com/artists/jim-lambie

2. Karla Black

Karla Black uses all manner of waste material to make things that often look like piles of waste materials. She is interested in colour and form rather than meaning, so the aesthetic is the most important aspect of her work. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/features/karla-black To me, the colours look insipid and unappealing, so the aesthetic object of her work is a bit lost on me.

3. Sarah Morris

She’s probably the one I like most in this series of artists. In some ways she has a similar approach to colour and line to Jim Lambie, but she uses them more creatively. I think I could learn a lot from her about how to design posters. I particularly like the image at top right. I like the stability of the horizontals and verticals combined with the subtle use of curves to add some energy. I also like the warmer hues. The image beneath it is also interesting in the treatment of the silhouette. I like the way the neons show up agains the black, and the way the curved lines follow the brim of the hat, which would have been lost within the black of the unlighted silhouette.

Sarah Morris https://whitecube.com/exhibitions/exhibition/sarah_morris_bermondsey_2021

4. Joy Labinjo

Joy Labinjo uses colour to create tone by using blobs and lines of colour rather than moving smoothly from tone to tone in a more graduated way. Her paintings remind me a bit of Impressionism in the way that paint is applied. I feel that these images would be best seen from a distance, where the brain would be more able to unify the colours and see the tonal impression more clearly. This doesn’t work as well on the small scale of a digital screen. As I tend to work on small pieces this technique probably wouldn’t work well for me.

https://www.tiwani.co.uk/artists/26-joy-labinjo/

5. George Shaw

George Shaw uses the limited colour palette of Humbrol modelling paints. These give his work a distinctive style, using the dull and rather flat colours available in these small pots. They make all his paintings look a bit dismal, which seems to suit the subject matter. I guess I’m a bit pre-programmed not to like these, having looked at these paint colours a lot in relation to my ex’s model railway bits and pieces.

6  David Batchelo

David Batchelor works across a range of media, but in all of them what seems to define his work is the use of bright splashes or blocks of colour set against a (usually) white or black background. He also shows a strong sense of pattern. I find these quite appealing, although I’m not usually drawn to blocks of solid colour. It’s interesting to see how the more conventional painted pieces can be created by the use of coloured lights. 

https://www.davidbatchelor.co.uk/works/drawings/atomic-1997/

The title of this exercise is, perhaps, more intriguing than the examples we were asked to consider. Can colour be defined by time? Is colour now different from colour 1000 years ago, for example? At face value the answer would be that it’s not. As far as we can tell, the grass was always green, the sky often grey, and so on. Obviously we can’t go back and look, but it would seem unlikely that the natural world has changed colour. However, looking at the work of David Batchelor in particular, it’s most unlikely that his colour palette could have been dreamed of by medieval people. The use of process colours, and, particularly, the use of electric light, could never have been produced prior to the last century or so. It’s true to say that many artists continue to use traditional pigments and methods, such as the writing of icons, for example. However, this is now a choice, rather than the only available paints, dyes and inks being rather expensive and handmade from natural plants and minerals. The human-made world does indeed look very different from the way it did in previous centuries.