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SATURDAY EVENING POST
March 22nd, 2025
Colour has a unique power to stir emotions and shape our experience and relationship with not only art, but the world around us. From the earliest use of precious pigments, colour has been the driving force in artistic expression. When there is a lack of clear subject, as in abstraction, the boundary of colour has been pushed and re-explored, sometimes overwhelming the canvas with vibrant hues, other times reducing the palette to near nothingness.
Colour in art has evolved from a symbolic tool in ancient and classical painting to an autonomous subject in modern abstraction. In ancient times and through the Middle Ages, artists were limited by available pigments, for example, ultramarine, blue made from lapis lazuli was as precious as gold, and colours often carried strict symbolism (gold for the divine, red for power or sacrifice, etc.). Renaissance and Baroque painters then mastered colour to imitate reality and light. Think in terms of Vermeer’s luminous beiges and blues, or Caravaggio’s dramatic red drapery.
But it was not until the 19th century that artists truly began to liberate colour from description and use it expressively. The Impressionists broke new ground by studying how colour and light actually appear to the eye (Monet’s shadows full of colour, Seurat’s pointillist dots mixing optically). Soon after, the Fauves like Henri Matisse went further, using wild, non-naturalistic colours purely for emotional effect, shocking viewers around 1905 with “colour for its own sake” as a vehicle of joy or tension. This opened the door for abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky, often credited as the first abstract painter, believed colours and shapes could play like instruments in a symphony, each eliciting spiritual vibrations in the soul.
By the mid-20th century, colour had become a primary subject of art itself. Abstract Expressionists in New York (such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman) created vast fields of colour intended to flood the viewers with feeling. Rothko’s deep colour, for instance, were meant to evoke “basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom” and indeed many viewers have broken down in tears before his paintings. In these works, colour is no longer serving form, colour is the form and content, conveying mood directly. Art critic Clement Greenberg coined the term Colour Field painting for artists like Rothko, Newman, and Clyfford Still, who abandoned figure and gesture in favour of expansive colour as the vehicle of meaning. This movement influenced Canadian painters as well. Jack Bush shifted from early Abstract Expressionist styles to a cleaner Colour Field approach, “using an all-over coverage of thinly applied bright colours” to share feelings directly through hue. Greenberg hailed Bush as a “supreme colourist” and Bush’s vibrant canvases encapsulate joyful emotions comparable to jazz music. Bush described his goal as “not to have the red look like a side of a barn but to let it be the red for its own sake”. For Bush, colour is no longer a descriptor, it is the subject.
Parallel to these developments, art theory and science were also unlocking colour’s secrets. Early colour theorists like Johannes Itten (of the Bauhaus) and Josef Albers showed how colours interact, how the same red can appear different against blue versus against green, for example. Albers’ influential Interaction of Colour demonstrated that our perception of colour is relative and context-dependent, an idea that Op Art in the 1960s playfully exploited.
In Canada, Joseph Kyle was among those experimenting with the idea of colour interactions, but with different intentions than Op-Art. In Kyle’s work, form and colour operate as one — a marriage, where neither is subservient to the other but dependent on each other for the essential experience of the painting. “Syn-optics” is Joseph Kyle’s contribution to abstract art. Similar to the word “symphony”, a coming together of sound and form, “Synoptics” is a harmony and coming together of visual elements. Optics, usually describing the behaviour of light, becomes the condition in which elements within a painting come to reveal their true beauty.
Synoptics, therefore, unlike Op-Art, elevates the language of visual elements, such as colour and composition, synoptics transcends an immediate visual confusion and excitement, where in Op-Art, the exploration of optical sensations is through the employment of rhythmic abstract patterns that repeat, or vibrating colour combinations, and through the composition of contrast of foreground and background to create motion and depth. Synoptics allows lines, colours, and composition to work in exact harmony.
While the physics of colour are universal, the meanings and feelings we assign to colours can vary greatly across cultures, generations, and individuals. A colour that evokes joy in one context may feel jarring or mournful in another. For instance, white, symbolic of purity and celebration in the West, is traditionally associated with mourning in China and India. Red may represent love and vitality in North America, it carries connotations of luck in Chinese culture and grief in parts of Africa. These symbolic divergences reveal colour as a cultural language, one that encodes emotion, ritual, and identity.
Even generational attitudes toward colour shift with the tides of fashion, media, and design. What appears elegant to one generation may strike another as nostalgic. These are of course generalizations, they illuminate how visual culture continually reshapes our sense of what feels natural, desirable, or expressive. Colour, in this way, is never neutral, it is always speaking.
Some people have synesthesia, literally hearing sounds or tasting flavours when seeing certain colours, or seeing colours when triggered by certain words. Others have strong emotional memories tied to a colour. This is a great way for artists to explore these responses, inviting viewers to bring their own set of emotions to the artwork. Abstract art in particular leans on this subjective aspect, a single field of pure colour can act as a mirror to the viewer’s psyche. Collectors know this well, falling in love with a painting because a colour just “speaks” to them, even if there is no accurate articulation for the feeling. Meanwhile another collector might walk right past the same piece, unmoved. There is no right or wrong in these reactions, the magic of colour is that it operates on a visceral, even subconscious level. Colour is a language without words, a luminous tongue that murmurs in countless dialects to the soul.
The decision to limit a palette to monochrome, or to one or two colours, is not a decision made lightly. For many artists, it is neither a stylistic shorthand nor an ascetic denial of colour’s pleasures, but rather a profound philosophical and aesthetic gesture, a pursuit of clarity, essence, and intensity unmediated by chromatic excess.
The history of this gesture is rich with intention. In 1915, Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square ruptured centuries of representational tradition. A single black quadrilateral painted on white canvas, it was, in his words, “the first step of pure creation in art.” In declaring the supremacy of pure feeling over depiction, Malevich did not empty the canvas, on the contrary, he filled it with metaphysical presence. The absence of colour did not signify nothingness, rather it invited boundless interpretation, a spiritual openness unburdened by the familiar visual codes of the external world.
This pursuit of purified expression found a later echo in the quiet intensity of Ad Reinhardt’s near-black canvases of the 1960s. What appeared at first glance to be unrelentingly monochrome revealed, upon sustained viewing, a lattice of faint chromatic modulations. Reinhardt’s work invited not passive viewing but a slowed-down, almost devotional attention, an experience bordering on the meditative. These paintings did not merely depict silence, they enacted it. The viewer, faced with their enveloping darkness, was required to abandon speed and expectation, to listen with their eyes.
Like Reinhardt, Molinari rejected the immediacy of visual gratification in favour of a temporal, meditative. In his Quantificateur series, Molinari orchestrates a near-invisible range of chromatic values, pushing a single colour to its perceptual threshold, so that distinctions between shapes and hues emerge only through prolonged attention. This slow revelation aligns with Reinhardt’s pursuit of the “ultimate” painting, one that resists spectacle and instead demands stillness. These paintings are not simply minimalist, but a rigorous chromatic environment, where colour is less a surface phenomenon than a phenomenological encounter.
Such reductive practices, however, are not confined to spiritual abstraction. For many artists, the decision to work within a narrow range of colours functions as a way of intensifying attention to other formal elements. Line, shape, texture, light, these become primary when colour recedes. This is evident in the high-contrast paintings of Franz Kline, whose gestural black forms on white grounds harnessed the drama of calligraphy and motion. Kline’s choice to forgo colour was not an abdication, but a deliberate focus: colour would have distracted from the muscular immediacy of form.
Agnes Martin offers another, more delicate interpretation. Her almost-monochrome grids, subtle washes of white, grey, or pastel overlaying faint pencil lines, are exercises in restraint and serenity. The colourlessness is not cold, it is hushed. For Martin, colour was subordinate to the larger emotional tenor of her work. “Happiness,” she wrote, “is being on the beam with life—to feel the pull of life.” Her canvases, devoid of chromatic drama, shines with this quiet pull. They do not ask for excitement, instead they ask for our presence.
Of course, the monochrome gesture can also be overtly conceptual. Yves Klein’s patented International Klein Blue was not merely a colour but a vehicle for transcendence. For him, his nearly all-blue works sought to engulf the viewer in the immaterial, to suggest colour not as descriptor but as cosmos. The intensity of that one colour, multiplied across canvases, became not a limitation but a portal.
What unites these artists, across their divergent approaches and philosophies, is a shared belief that less can indeed be more: more focused, more rigorous, more affecting. By paring down the palette, they prompt the viewer to see differently, to look harder, and to feel more acutely. Monochrome demands patience, because it ultimately rewards introspection. In a culture conditioned to expect immediate stimulation, the experience of engaging with a single-colour painting can feel almost subversive, an invitation to dwell in nuance, in slowness, in subtlety. And perhaps that its deepest allure, monochrome art does not tell us what to feel. It does not seduce with vibrancy or overwhelm with intensity. It waits. It opens a space, a conceptual and emotional void, that the viewer must choose to enter. For those attuned to its frequencies, this kind of work can feel like a balm. In its stillness, it reveals movement, and in its silence, it speaks.
In the end, the artist’s decision to limit colour is often a commitment to clarity, not austerity. It is an embrace of paradox: richness through restraint, expression through reduction, depth through the most economical of means. The palette may be pared down, but the intention is expansive.
As you continue your journey with art—whether as a collector, a creator, or a devoted viewer—pause. Listen to the colours that live within you. Pay quiet attention to the works that catch your breath, the ones that linger like a song you can’t forget, and those that arrive in your consciousness before you even understand why. These involuntary responses are not extraneous to the artwork, they are its completion. Colour is, after all, not “seen”, but felt. Do we dream in colour, or do we feel the colours in our dreams? Colour crosses the threshold between artist and viewer with uncanny intimacy. It reaches inward, and whispers in your ear the silence made visible.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
JACK BUSH: FLAUNTING THE RULES
On view until April 12, this exhibition enters its final three weeks. This is the first solo exhibition of Jack Bush’s work in BC in 47 years. Don’t miss your opportunity to experience these monumental and significant works in person, a powerful and must-see exhibition.
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UPCOMING EXHIBITION
BARBARA ASTMAN: CONCEALED/REVEALED
Opening Saturday, April 26th, 2025
