Week 3

Color can have various effects on our emotions.  In the book, I learned that restaurants often have the color red somewhere in their logo/place of business because it increases appetite.  I also learned that cool colors like blue can have a calming effect on the body and can lower blood pressure.  I was surprised to learn that the hue, value, and intensity of a color can affect the way it is perceived.  For example, in the “color” video, an artist named Mark Rothko used deeper hues of red, like deep maroon, to evoke anger and other negative emotions to customers of a restaurant.  This is fascinating to me – how is it that one hue of red can leave a customer with a stronger desire for food and another hue of red can completely shut their interest off?

I have always been interested in the two different kinds of color, additive and subtractive.  One would assume that shining several multi-colored lights together would create an unattractive shade of brown.  This is not the case!  When a red light, a blue light, and a green light are shined on the same spot at the same time, they create white light.  On the other hand, if one were to mix red, green, and blue paint together, the results would not be as pretty.  This aspect of color is amazing to me – depending on the medium that color exists in (light or ink/pigment), it reacts differently. 

In the color video, I was most impacted by the artist that June was trying to take influence from - Mark Rothko.  Rothko wanted to provide an emotional response to his work using only color.  His work now hangs in the Tape Gallery in London, even though they were originally made to decorate the Four Seasons restaurant in New York.  Since he hated the restaurant so much, he purposely painted works of art that, in his own words, would “ruin the appetite of any son-of-a-bitch who ate there.”  He wanted to make the diners feel as though they were trapped in a room with all the windows and doors bricked up.  Although I personally liked his work, I was intrigued that an artist wanted to instill such anger and frustration simply through the use of “angry” hues like dark maroon, etc.  I actually laughed at the fact that he had such a bitter reaction to a restaurant.  In addition, I enjoyed how June applied the paint to her canvas in large sections and how she was indiscriminate about applying and removing paint.  Her method was very interesting and was actually quite inspiring – I wish I could write songs like that!

In the feelings video, I appreciated David’s message that without kings or religion, we would have more freedom to express ourselves.  However, I found myself much more intrigued in Goya’s work.  His work was said to be “uncomfortable” which is an apt description of his paintings – but that’s why I am fascinated by it.  Goya was a “normal” artist before a sickness in his life left him deaf and apparently very bitter.  His art became very “dark.”  In essence, Goya was picturing his own nightmares in an effort to try to face them head on.  Some of his “black paintings” were astounding – the old man eating his child was quite disturbing.  A theme that I found in his work was thick, smothering earth - I liked his constant use of quicksand/swamp imagery.   Even when he wasn’t painting a swamp or quicksand, the ground in his art looked convoluted and swollen like the hill in The Shootings of May 3^rd.