What is Colour?

[Kursbeschreibung nur auf Englisch]

‘‘Light and darkness, brightness and obscurity, or if a more general expression is preferred, light and its absence, are necessary to the production of colour…¹"

Enlarge your personal palettes, knowledge and fabrication of colour. Let Goethe and former Bauhaus’ enthusiasts guide your contemporary mastering of how to employ and articulate colour. Revitalising your perception and use of hue reliant upon colour’s properties, form and application.

Theoretical bases underpin this two-week, online platform to play with colour. The course travels from hands-on experimentation to intensifying hue understanding; expanding potential applications to practice and actioning colour anew.

Addressing the cannon of colour theory (visiting, first hand Goethe’s archive to reviving Bauhaus’, Itten, Klee, Kandinsky, and successor, Albers implementations) with three main contemporary objectives: discovering ...

• colours’ properties - hue, tints, transparency, opacity, behaviour, affect;
• how colour is employed - form’s relevancy, composition and arrangement; 
• combined with how colour is applied - grounds, layering, stains, dyes, marked, projected, sampled versus projected forms of light.

Online delivery of demos, group discussions and activities will support individual testing and making with tutor- (and student-) led exercises and feed-forward instruction. Inclusive of connecting to Klassik Stiftung Weimar’s digital archive visits. Aimed at a broad interdisciplinary range of practices - the painter, designer, surface/printmaker, textile stylist or stage designer. Methods include: making hues, exercising paint, pigments, dye, staining, projecting tinted light, digital production, compositional play, collage, assembling forms (2D, 3D, scenic), while considering gesture, action, disposition, signals and balance. By the end of this course, students will walk away with a personalised colour swatch book, and have confidently, re-evaluated and re-equipped their colour comprehension and palettes for practice. Technical planning: Daily access to a personal computer. An advised materials list will follow.

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¹ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours.