Presenter - Roy Osborne

Roy Osborne, Artist, Educator and Writer
Afternoon Breakout Session

A Strategy for Teaching Color and Form in Art

A practical method is offered for exploring the relationship between color and form in art and design based on basic principles of color and form perception. A prominent feature of Josef Albers’ teaching was to employ simple shapes and formats on the assumption that the less distracting the form the greater was the emphasis on color. While such an approach has merit, it is a matter of fact that most artists and designers use complex and irregular forms, including pictorial imagery. Though ‘awareness of the interdependence of color and form’ is mentioned, Albers’ Interaction of Color (1963) offers no clear pathway for expanding its contents into such interdependence. In order to translate theories of ‘color versus color’ into ‘color versus form’, the talk will summarize a simple strategy (with complex possibilities) aimed specifically at artists, designers and art teachers. In particular, by harnessing basic principles of perceptual psychology, the talk examines how manipulating each of the six main devices that induce depth and figure-ground division – namely, highlight-and-shadow, overlapping of form, texture perspective, color perspective, size perspective, and linear perspective – can enable artists to control, weaken or strengthen color interaction in imagery and design in general. Osborne’s earliest attempt to analyze this was in the last chapter of his Lights and Pigments (1980), expanded into seven chapters of a subsequent manuscript, Color Influencing Form (1984), applied in his studio teaching, but not published until 2004.

Bio

Roy Osborne MA is an artist, educator and writer on color. For over 50 years he has sustained an interest in color theory, explored in several series of abstract and illusionist paintings examining color in relation to implied depth, figure-ground ambiguity, pattern, symmetry, implied transparency and light-and-shade. His works typically feature horizontal, vertical, diagonal or curved divisions of a square, with regular patterns encouraging the eye to explore arrays of colors punctuated by elementary shapes primarily defined by color contrasts. As an educator, since 1970, he has taught color, design and art-history modules and presented over 2,000 lectures at over 200 institutions in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. As an author he has contributed to over 20 books on color, from Lights and Pigments: Colour Principles for Artists (1980) to Renaissance Colour Symbolism (2019). A presentation of his theories is included in his Color Influencing Form (2004) and Pigments of the Imagination (2016). In 2003 he was awarded the first Turner Medal of the Colour Group (Great Britain), and in 2019 was awarded the first Colour in Art, Design and the Environment medal of the International Colour Association."