Sunday 13 September 2015

Whistler and Peacock Blue

^Whistler's Peacock Room, Neil Greentree / Freer Gallery of Art

Exclusively for Saturated Space, Amanda Kolson Hurley tells the engrossing, gossipy, tangled story of the genesis of the Peacock Room, its intimate relationship with Whistler the artist, and his reputation, the end it brought to a key friendship, all of which was deeply stained with the enigmatic and somewhat equivocal shade that suffused the room, and came to be known as Peacock Blue.


"The story behind James McNeill Whistler's Peacock Room is one of high artistic ambition, a quarrel over money, and a broken friendship. Less well known is the origin of its color scheme, especially the color we have come to know as "peacock blue." Why did Whistler paint the room a moody teal and not, as one would expect, the deep blue of a peacock's breast? This article considers Whistler's color choices and argues that "peacock blue" is a shade that owes more to Whistler than to nature."


Monday 27 July 2015

Does the Barreleye Dream of Swiss Cheese? Windows, Mirrors and Holes


Exclusively for Saturated Space, Amelia Stein oscillates through the multiple transparencies -reflective, deep, superficial and profound- of our contemporary environment.


"This series of passages explores how transparency, reflectivity and opacity can adhere to, encroach on and confuse ideas about colour. It imagines a spectrum not just of light but of the mediation of light by these surface properties, which transmit, reflect and absorb light in time and space in ways both distinct from and connected to colour. Using the models of windows, mirrors and holes, and the examples of the barreleye fish, sunglasses and Swiss cheese, among others, this piece asks what we see when we look at, through, and into surfaces."

Sunday 12 July 2015

I'm Beginning to See the Light


Exclusively for Saturated Space, Jack Murphy delves into the world of Robert Irwin's chromatic emitters.


"Robert Irwin is an American artist from Los Angeles whose work deals with perception. Cacophonous, a show of recent light pieces at the Pace Gallery in New York City. Starting from the ready-made cool white fluorescent tube 6' or 8' in length, Irwin layers coloured gels—sometimes up to a dozen overlays—to manipulate, reflect, darken, or fully obscure the bulb's output. A visit to the show affords the opportunity to reflect generally on Irwin's use of colour throughout his career, and to dig deep into the rich chromatic experience of these works."

Tuesday 19 May 2015

Blinky Palermo's Wall drawings & Wall Paintings: Line, Colour and Consciousness

^Blinky Palermo, Wandmalerei im großen Saal der Kunsthalle, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden,
1970. Photograph Erika Fischer


Exclusively for Saturated Space, Mark Pimlott explores the subtle spatial ambiguities of Blinky Palermo's Wall works.

"This essay describes wall drawings and paintings made by German artist Blinky Palermo (born Peter Schwarze 1943 Leipzig-died 1977 Maldives). These works, no longer in existence, were bound to their architectural conditions, in art galleries, museums, temporary spaces for art or people’s homes. The form of these works varied from line drawings tracing architectural features to fields and figures of colour painted directly on walls that made viewers aware of the specific characteristics of envrionments, altering viewers' reading of them. The works were made within a practice of painting, and embedded within a phenomenological approach: their engagements with their settings activated those settings and their viewers’ relations to them. Although much has been made of Joseph Beuys’s influence on Palermo (he was a student of Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1963-1967), his work proposed a different role for art in society than Beuys: Palermo's work established his concerned with the viewer’s place in the world and accentuated consciousness as a vehicle for engagement therein."



Monday 9 February 2015

Colour As I See It

^Dorothy Liebes, High Mass, circa 1943. Photo: American Craft Council


Exclusively for Saturated Space, Alexa Griffith Winton introduces us to the dyed world of Dorothy Liebes, who filled the gap left between the human need for tactile, sensual engagement with the surrounding environment, and the austere spaces created by post-war Modernist orthodoxy.


"Interiors magazine, in an obituary of textile designer and hand weaver Dorothy Liebes in 1972, called her, “the mother of the twentieth-century palette.” Liebes’ unusual and often bold use of colour, metallics, and unusual materials in her hand woven fabrics for the home helped shape the look of the post-war domestic interior in the United States. This essay looks at her approach to working with architects and interior designers within the context of her approach to colour, as well as some of Liebes’ many writings on colour published in both popular and design magazines."