GW: With over 20 years experience educating on the topic of color theory, do you feel you have mastered the subject?

RK: I was highly anxious when I was first asked to teach a color class. I had to learn it again from scratch, since the color class I had in school was academic and abstract. I was more interested in the “why’s” of color than the “how’s”, and I wanted to make certain that every hour in class lead to something a student could use.

After those years I have met the majority of my early goals in the class, and exceeded some of them, but I have never felt the conviction of mastery. I used to have to consult charts to figure out if I was viewing a split complementary harmony. I can recognize one much faster now. I can tell when a writer of a color book doesn’t know their subject, and I stopped treating simultaneous contrast like a magic trick years ago. I know enough to be skeptical more often than I am awed, unfortunately.

But there are color practitioners with the ability to create sensuality from abstractions, cinematographers who create worlds with light and others whose intuitive intelligence baffles and amazes me. I hope I never find a way to rationalize what they do.

GW: Not too many artists can claim to have worked with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I imagine this must have been some experience?

RK: I did the graphic design for four of his visits to Southern California, but I only had the chance to meet him once, and for five minutes. There is not another living being I could hope to meet in person than His Holiness. It was a thrill, but I also knew he had more pressing things on his mind than sitting for a photography session.

GW: Color is a mysterious subject for artists. Even at the professional level there seems to be a shortage of valuable information for artists when it comes to color theory. Any ideas as to why this is?

RK: This question had bothered me for years, and I have developed some answers to salve that frustration. One reason in the traditional world of fine art is that, until fairly recently in history, artists mixed their own pigments. Although there was some standardization of color sources, there was no standardization of color names. Scarlet, Crimson, Cardinal and Carmine are too often used interchangeably, for example. Also, color can be a specifier of some emotional experience, but the experience has many parts, and color is often given as the sole “reason” for why you feel as you do. On top of that we use different color wheels to serve as metaphors for color relationships, and most people get confused as to why we need more than one.

GW: What color rules do you see broken, or ignored, the most in student work?

RK: I teach at an applied arts school, and the amount of time spent on our lovingly birthed creations will remain in the conscious mind of most viewers for 2 or 3 seconds. Our job isn’t so much to adhere to standards of beauty so that future generations can experience our talent, it is much more to get people’s attention and focus and mold their reaction in two seconds. So, those early twentieth century attempts to create guaranteed harmonic hue relations are what I see dismissed most often. And some students use the Pantone® color palette as a color picker.

GW: Do you find artists use too many colors or too broad a color range with access to the limitless palettes in applications like Photoshop?

RK: Nothing changed the range of color and amount of available saturation as the introduction of chemically based paints in the nineteenth century. I haven’t seen as much change in how we arrange hues due to Photoshop, as I have seen new paradigms of edge definition. I am more aware of texture indulgences than color ones as Photoshop sins.

GW: With so many artist in our community using Photoshop and Painter, how does the digital color wheel or color mixing differ from the traditional wheel used for paints.

RK: Most software color wheels use an additive hue circle, because that is the native language of the monitor itself. This emphasizes blues and greens more than the artists’ color wheel, but I don’t believe that has lead to more chilly looking paintings. I think two other things may be more influential. First, the visual feedback you get from a monitor is projected at you, and the saturation, as well as the value contrast are far higher than light reflected off of paint. Secondly, software color wheels all come with controls for value and saturation, along with hue, but art school color wheels are only concerned with hue.

GW: Can you recommend any creative talents who use color well as a narrative tool?

RK: My main interest in color as a narrative tool is in cinema, and I think Zhang Yimou is high on the list of our great contemporary colorists. In animation, everything has to be invented, and Pixar has made wonderful use of this opportunity and burden, especially in using colored light. Chris Applehans and Khang Le, especially in their pre-production work in “Monster House”, have given me a perfect tool to explain the importance of colored light in visual storytelling. Todd Haynes‘ “From Heaven” is another dramatic example.

*All images courtesy of Richard Keyes.