The Interaction of Line and Color

When it comes to looking at color – and focusing on color, I like it when artists utilize color in order to place some kind of emphasis.  As much as line portrays life, color adds a soul.  Though I wish I could claim that thought my own, it was in 1574 that Marco Boschini stated, “Without color, il disegno may be called a body without a soul.”

Lois Greenfield is a photographer that not only captures the human body in motion, but captures an energy and essence of the person that I can’t quite put my finger on.  In looking through her portfolio, I noticed how in one work she was able to utilize colors specifically to add a quality to her photographs.

In this one in particular, she uses red in both photographs, but the red takes on new characteristics between the two photographs.  In the first, the red against the white and the light silhouette is takes on a weightless and airy personality.  The dancer’s position also emphasizes that trait.  On the contrary, the red paired with the black gives the red a darker and more fiery character. The dramatic movements of the dancer and the continuing line of the red fabric mark out this contrast to the first photograph. 

This work reminded me much of the slides of Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color and his theory on “reversed grounds” where a single color can seem like two when interacting with a different background.  If you look closely, these two reds are extremely similar, but the use of interacting this red with white and with black reveals the different personalities of this same red.  The first is a lighthearted red playing with white and the second is a dramatic red dancing with black.  You could say that these portray this red’s different emotions.

 I think it so interesting how a color is a color, yet when it interacts with other color it takes on so many different “emotions”.  Lines portray life, but color adds the soul to a work – completing the idea that so much of what is human can be communicated through something that is not human, like line and color.