EXCURSION TO THE WORLD OF PAINTING (part 1)
Painting, according to the apt remark of the artist K. Yuon, is “a living letter or a letter about the living”. At first glance, this may seem paradoxical: after all, living writing and writing about living things are not the same thing. But in this case, the paradox of this statement is only apparent. With the words “letter about the living,” the artist reveals the subject of painting, and “living writing” – its means. In painting, the shape of the object is conveyed, its color, the light illuminating it, the texture of the material, the space in which the depicted object is located. Therefore, painting uses such specific graphic means as a line, color, chiaroscuro, aerial and linear perspective, etc. These graphic means make it possible to create an illusion of three-dimensionality on a plane, to correctly convey the feeling of volumetric objects in the world around us, to preserve and multiply the multi-color nature and so on. D. “On his canvases,” wrote Paustovsky about Van Gogh, “he depicted the earth. It was as if he washed it with miraculous dew, and it was illuminated with paints of such brightness and density that every old tree turned into a work of sculpture, and every clover field into sunlight, embodied in many modest flower corollas. ” This is about Van Gogh and at the same time – about painting in general. The painter recreates the real world, using for this purpose paints applied to a specially prepared surface. Volumetric, three-dimensional, full of breathing life, as it were, freezes on a two-dimensional plane. Multicolor, shimmering in many shades, saturated with a game of chiaroscuro, the canvas of a true master reliefly conveys the richness of life in a diverse color palette. Plane painting does not lead to a unification of reality.
Putting paints on a canvas or any other surface, the painter turns them into a color that creates an idea of the material qualities (texture) of the depicted object, and its color, etc. Due to the fact that the phenomenon of life is not monochromatic and monotonous, painting depicts not only the color of each individual object, but also the complex combination that forms objects with different colors when they are located in a certain form and are given in the aggregate. The combination of colors, color harmony and form color in the painting.
The color is so important that other artists even argue that the whole painting is based mainly on one color. They believe that the impressions that the artist receives from life in the picture turn “into purely coloristic values.” Of course, without color there is no painting. By means of color the artist expresses the content of the picture, causes a certain mood in its perception. And it often happens that the viewer still does not have time to delve into the plot, and the color immediately creates a certain psychological attitude to the picture, evokes the corresponding feelings – joyful, alarming, wary, etc. Thanks to the color, the painting evokes a certain mood in the viewer, empathy, understanding thoughts and feelings of the people depicted in the picture.
But color is not an end in itself in art, but a means. The color scheme, the picturesque qualities of a painting acquire more or less value in direct proportion to the extent to which they help to reveal an ideological and aesthetic design.
Such is, for example, the brilliant picture of V. Surikov “Morning of the Streletsky Execution”. The richest color scheme of the picture – its dark, dense coloring, lilac fog, white shirts of archers, flickers of lights flickering against their background – all this is not a “riot of colors”, but amazing craftsmanship that most vividly conveys one of the dramatic moments of Russian history.
A painting is created in more than one color. The frame of the picture is a drawing. The drawing conveys the shape of the object, its shape. You can not belittle the meaning of the picture by exaggerating the meaning of color. Theorists of the anti-realistic trends in painting, in particular the proponents of abstract art, not only belittle, but simply ignore the meaning of the picture. Some of them claim that color in painting can play the same role as sound in music: the point is supposedly not in a realistic depiction of the objects of the world around us, but in the fact that with color alone it is possible to evoke the corresponding associations from the viewer.
