Jennifer Noxon

      Spent the winter painting scenes from summer – rich in colour – and now that spring has sprung and summer is teasing me with her new growth, I’ve started using a lot of white. Who would have guessed? Could be a way of cleansing my ‘palette’ – like pickled ginger between bites of sumptuous morsels of sushi. Getting back to basics before branching out again to further develop a visual thread.

While manning my booth at last weekend’s New Art Festival in Ottawa, I had quite a few conversations about colour and choice of palette. I tend to stick with a pretty minimal palette – cyan blue, cad red med, cad yellow med, black and white. Once in a while I spread my wings and try other blues – cerulean or cobalt but often end up back with cyan. It seems to have the ability to be warm or cool depending on what it’s mixed with. Colours stay clean, clear – not muddied. Use black and white quite liberally if I want more/less intensity or more contrast. May add some dioxazine violet to deepen blacks – maybe some red sienna to soften the cad red. Overall I find most colours I want can be mixed with he three/four colours above.

Connie Smith Siegel’s Spirit of Color – A Sensory Meditation Guide to Creative Expression is a very accessible read. Her chapter The Inner Language of Colour provides several exercises for those who want to experiment with colour combinations using a meditative approach rather than a purely theoretical one. She speaks of colour ‘chords’ – and refers to colour and music as universal languages. Yay.  Smith Siegel integrates “the intuitive and objective aspects of color into a comprehensive guide to expressive color – uncovering the inner source of color through meditation and carrying its evocative power into drawing and painting media.” There are very good pictorial references to illustrate her points - both from the great masters as well as from her contemporaries.

For those overwhelmed with colour and all it’s possibilities – and for those interested in the intuitive aspects of colour – you’ll find this a chewy read.