REVERSE ENGINEERING MATISSE

“When I put colors together, they have to join a living chord, like a musical chord or harmony.”
--Matisse

Figure 1. Using the HVC Color Composer, we found a very conscious and coherent proportional scheme underlying this Matisse masterpiece. This arrangement by Matisse is very similar to the recommended master Colors’ Progressions.

Figure 2. Two variations of Matisse’s composition using the same numerical arrangement in the same places. In the illustration second from left, we divide the numbers provided by the HVC Color Composer by ten to get a feeling for the proportions that are created by Matisse’s composition. Ten steps on the Composer represent one distinct whole step.

LEARNING FROM THE MASTER

Matisse is the father of modern graphic design. His late cutout series deals with many of the same problems that modern graphic artists wrestle with today. Flat areas of colors, highly stylized shapes, abstract compositions. Matisse created these masterworks by having his assistants paint large pieces of paper with brilliant gouache colors. He would then cut out the shapes he wanted before placing them into his compositions. The results were astonishingly beautiful. What can we learn from Matisse? With the HVC Color Composer we can analyze these works to a degree never before possible and get a true feeling for how he organized his color compositions in an orderly, harmonic way.

Another interesting Matisse quote: “I strive to create striking proportions (with color).” The way to create striking and powerful color combinations in your work is to use the HVC Color Composer and to use the Master Colors’ Progressions to compose your works. These progressions are designed to provide an underlying harmonic orderliness to the work. (See our first ColorBlog article.)

“Colors have their own distinctive beauty you have to preserve, just as in music you try to preserve sounds. It is a question of organization, of finding the arrangement that will keep the beauty and freshness of the color.”
--Matisse

Great knowledge from the master! There is probably no other artist that translates as well as Matisse’s cutout works in reproductions. This is another aspect of his work that makes Matisse so relevant to today’s professional artists, because most of the work must go through the printing process for publication. In this article we used the HVC Color Composer to see if we can find an underlying harmonic in Matisse’s works.

What we have found is that Matisse consistently used simple and repeatable numerical proportions to achieve his extraordinary virtuosity in the use of color. Now at last we have a tool to try to discover more specifically what he meant by his remarks. This way, every art student in the world can study Matisse’s work, or the works of other masters, in a practical way and apply this knowledge to their own work.

HVC stands for hue, value and chroma (intensity). To create meaningful proportional relationships, the numerical relationships between colors have to be determined. There are different ways of explaining this idea of color harmonics, but perhaps one of the clearest and most useful ways to get at this subject is through the idea of contrast.

The HVC Color Composer takes one or more of what we at Master Colors call “Target Colors” and finds all of the colors that are a certain requested distance from those colors. Master Colors uses a scale of 88 steps, which is the distance between black and white, the highest numerical contrast, and which, coincidentally, also happens to be the same number of keys on a piano. The connection between color and music is more than an analogy. In fact, music and color work exactly alike. Both musical harmony and color harmony are based on simple, underlying numerical and proportional relationships.

When we think of contrast, we generally tend to think of a gray scale, or values. The only meaningful definition of contrast, however, has to take the two other perceptual elements of a color into account, those being hue, and chroma, which is a measure of how weak or strong a hue is.  So at Master Colors, when we refer to contrast, it is always the combined HVC Contrast that we are quantifying with our software.

This way of organizing and understanding color space in terms of hue, value and chroma was developed by the great color scientist Munsell over a century ago. The Munsell system is to this day the world’s standard in the identification of color and the appropriate perceptual organization of three-dimensional color space for artists and designers. (See illustrations below.)

Figure 3. For this interpretation of the Matisse, we started with a blue that was 50 steps from the white, which provided a different range of available colors in Master Colors’ HVC space. Most of the strong hues are between 40 to 60 HVC Contrast steps from white, except of course the very light hues like yellow and gold. In the illustration on the right, we used Matisse’s scheme but did not put the contrasts in the same places Matisse did, gaining access to a host of different colors in HVC space.

Comments

[robohope]

Great.Please keep analysing and keep writing. Haven't read it! But have bookmarked it on delicious. Great idea.R & squorch747

[abi]

finding colours this way seems to negate creativity, individuality and the need for an artist/designer to work out aesthetically pleasing colour combinations themselves!