COLOUR THEORY
H
enri Matisse once said that
“colour was not given to us in
order that we should imitate
nature” but rather it “was given to us
so that we can express our emotions”.
The French painter was a prime
proponent of a movement known as
Fauvism, which brought a complete
freedom of expression and visual
interpretation to the world of painting
and colour. “What characterised
Fauvism was that we rejected
imitative colours, and that with
pure colours we obtained stronger
reactions – more striking reactions,”
he said. Through this style of painting,
Matisse was attempting to return
to the innocence of his childhood,
yet he credited his ultimate freedom
to his academic training.
Matisse and his fellow painter
André Derain were dubbed Les
Fauves (or “the wild beasts”) by
an irate art critic in 1905 for their
seemingly primitive approach to paint.
Along with the likes of Raoul Dufy
and Kees van Dongen, the pair had
arrived at this new world of freedom
in colour and expression from
a number of directions.
The artist Gustave Moreau, one
of Matisse’s teachers, was a strong
influence on young painters in 1890s
Paris. Moreau advocated freedom of
experimentation and creativity in his
young students. Van Gogh, Gauguin
and Cézanne contributed a sense of
pure colour, expressive brushwork
and strong two-dimensional design
to the atmosphere being breathed by
the young painters of the 1890s. John
Russell, the Australian Impressionist
painter who painted with Claude
Monet, imparted Impressionist
method and colour theory to the
young Henri Matisse. This cocktail
of influences briefly coalesced to
become the Fauves for a brief time
in France during the first decade
of the 20th century.THREE WAYS TO WORK
For contemporary painters, employing
the Fauvist ideas of the pure colour
interpretation of nature can be
extremely liberating. Three areas,concerns or strategies can be
identified as a guide for anyone
interested in adopting the Fauvist
approach today.
The first is the subject. In the realm
of Fauvism and early Expressionist
paintings, the subjects were drawn
from observed nature. Still life,
landscapes, portraiture, interiors
and nudes were ready made subjects
for the interpretation of colour,
brushwork and design. Such subjectswere part of the academic trainingof
most of the Fauvist and early modern
painters in their ateliers. These
traditional painting subjects remained
the mainstay of French Fauvist
painting. In a sense though, the
subject mattered much less thanthe
approach to the use of colour and
expression. Almost anything couldbe
the topic of exploration for the Fauvist
painters: a building, a scene, a flower,
and so on. For the contemporaryUnknown artist,
Portrait of Silver,
oil on panel,
3 5 .6x 27. 9 c m
True to Fauvism,
the model’s facial
colours have
been related to
their closest pure
prismatic color,
rather than mixing
complex, subtle
tints and shades.Artists & Illustrators 75