Tag Archives: Bauhaus

Whales in the Forest

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Dear reader,

When I moved to the mountains in Western North Carolina, my palette became warmer because of autumn. The mountains go crazy with color in the fall and won’t be ignored. When I was a boy in the Black Hills, autumn came on a Wednesday and then we had three feet of snow for the weekend. Besides, Ponderosa pine needles don’t change color so there was no change from summer to winter. I lived in Los Angeles and we had four seasons, but they were fire, flood, earthquake and riot. There was no autumn influence in my fifty-year incarceration there.

The personal choice of color is subjective, and we choose color that makes us comfortable. Professional colorists select it to affect emotion, comfort, purchasing, identification and a myriad of results. Artists of every stripe can be objective in color selection to solve problems or accomplish goals, but personal color selection is subjective. Warm color preference is my style and “my style” has been called “the sum of my bad habits.” Now and then, I’ll do a dominantly cool piece, which I usually set aside for a period of time and view with suspicion.

When I got to North Carolina, my wife already had painters working on the living room. They were using a good white and two soft neutrals of the beige persuasion. I’m not comfortable in a visually safe, monochromatic environment so I added a bright, chrome yellow for a wall in the large entrance, a bathroom, two walls in my studio and as accents around the kitchen windows and the fireplace.

When the painters picked up the yellow paint the clerk asked if they were going to paint lines down the highway. But when the job was finished one of them said, “Mr. Monahan, I thought it would be garish, but it works!” I explained that it was the amount of yellow that we used. The contrasts of amounts used (variation of proportion) is the primary consideration in every choice of any element in art. My definition of design for any art is the study of proportion. Big is big when compared to something small, red is brightest when compared with a touch of green, and so on and on and on. Name any art and I’ll show you how the artist has used variations of proportion.

Leo Monahan Paper Sculpture

I began designing the “Spouting Whales” color wheel’s variation of proportion by thinking about a whale’s physique. It is bodied with undulating shapes starting at the nose and ending at the tail in a spiral. The overlapping whales assume hidden bulk. The underbody blends from white into tints (the addition of white) into pure color in a smaller proportion than the upper body, which starts with a modified or neutral version of the same color that blends into a darker value (dark & light) at the center. I toned down the colors with the addition of the direct complement (the opposite side of the color wheel). This is getting “teachy,” but I don’t have another way of describing things. The darker body color is blended with raw umber, an earth tone.

The spouts are the direct complement of the underbelly. For example, the violet whale at the bottom has a yellow spout and the yellow whale at the top has a violet spout. The star shape in the center is visually insistent and the eye starts there then moves out in large spiral shapes and is rewarded by the small accents of the bright spouts. All of the hues (color) have been tinted with white to about 75% for contrast, and the whole wheel is mounted on black to enhance the colors.

Joseph Albers, who had been a Bauhaus student under Itten, modified the color course from what it had been under Paul Klee and Kankinsky, expanded it to a full year and put it into the rational system that I studied under Bill Moore and then taught for many years. Albers was one of the instructors who came to America after the Nazis closed the school and he worked, taught here, and became the famous painter that we know. The list of famous artists that came out of the Bauhaus is impressive to say the least.
Read the history.

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Aspen groves grew near water and took over when forest fires killed the pines. They were favorite places to play when I was a boy in the Black Hills. They could be deep and dark, white but non-threatening. The first forest is narrow (20×30”), and has a strong vertical thrust which is enhanced by the tall narrow trees that move up from dark to light. The negative spaces between the three main trees are very strong, wavy flames that point up to reinforce the vertical direction. Referring back to the list of elements and coordinating principles, the layout is the dominantly vertical direction of trees with a horizontal subordinate of landscape.

The color is limited to variations on earth colors, burnt sienna, raw sienna, burnt umber and raw umber. I don’t use them right out of the tube; I add small amounts of color to give them character. There are dozens of bright color accents in the shapes of the forest floor. The paper is heavily embossed and painted in variations of the earth tones. The color accents hit the higher embossed shapes.

The values (dark and light) are dominantly dark with a subordinate use of white, but the white trees make up the main interest with their negative spaces and textural overlay.

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This forest has a more passive direction (24×30”). While the elements and techniques are the same, the intent is to pull you into the forest instead of up into the top of the trees. The visual flow is along the strong diagonal tree arrangement as they recede among the overlapping horizontal landscape shapes. It’s the same forest with different ideas.

“I wonder whom these woods belong to. I’m not sure I’ll walk through there even though it would be a short cut. It’s dark and gloomy with rough rocky ground and brush. What if I fell and injured myself? No one would ever find me. Wait…what was that? I think I saw something moving. Just another reason not to go in there but it’s probably my imagination. No, dammit, there’s something in there…Oh, jeez, it’s two little boys and a dog.”

“What were you doing in there boys? Is that dog friendly, will he bite?”

“We always play there and my dog will lick you all over. Do you walk in the woods mister?”

“Oh sure, I’m in there a lot, I just I love the deep, dark woods. Big people aren’t afraid of places like this y’know. I’m not going through this time but when I’m here again, I’ll just traipse right in there and wander around and have a lot of fun.”

“Ok mister, we gotta go home for lunch. G’bye.”

“G’bye boys…. Jeez.”

 

Thanks for visiting with me…

leo

The first Forest, Black Hill I, just sold. The second forest, Black Hills II, is available for $3200 at the Cut, Bend, Fold, ColorColorColor exhibit at the Grovewood Gallery in Asheville, NC.

Rainbow Hands

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Dear reader,

Here I am again. This is blog number two. If you want to know what these blogs are about you can review my first blog. We’re talking about basic design and color theory as it relates to my work.

Johannes Itten left the Bauhaus in 1923 and his book on color was published in 1960. In the more than 50 years since I left Chouinard, I have absorbed many other ideas and modified the preliminary or foundation course as culture and styles have changed. Other design schools and instructors all over the world have done the same. I hope you realize that styles may change, but the elements and coordinating principles stay the same. The elements are: line, shape, form, space, texture, value, and color. The coordinating principles are: proportion, contour continuation, repetition, positive-negative, direction, transition, variation, dominant-subordinate, active-passive, and advancing-receding.
I’ll try to talk about them as I show my work.

Itten’s color system is what I taught and have used since 1957. In the last blog I showed the color and design elements involved in the “Faces” logo for this blog, as well as another color wheel I call “Color Whales” which came about after “Rainbow Trout,” another visual pun that I made when I was trying to sell stuff to Trout Unlimited.

Leo Monahan Paper Sculpture

As you can see, I sculpted the trout realistically and painted the three primary and three secondary colors on their sides. I selected yellow, red, blue, orange, violet, and green to complete the color wheel. The colors are slightly modified or neutralized by the addition of white. The pattern that the tails make was serendipitous. Some things just happen happily. I like this one and won’t sell it, unless someone offers me some money. It reminds me of my childhood in the Black Hills. A trout stream ran through my back yard; where I used a willow fishing pole to drown a lot of worms until the older boys taught me to catch trout with my hands. The worm population was safe.

Paul Klee, who took over the course when Itten left, said that circles flowed, squares were calm and triangles were dynamic. The Trout color wheel certainly flows because of the spinning direction of the arrangement. Speckles on the trout are symbolic of any dot pattern on trout and the fish have a small white spot for the reflection on the eyes that indicate life. These trout could be any trout. The rainbow, in “Rainbow Trout,” is the wheel’s main concept.

I was in Berlin a few years ago and visited the Bauhaus Archive. I explained the Chouinard connection to the curator and he showed me through an exhibition of Paul Klee’s students’ work from the post-1923 foundation course. The students’ design problems were eerily similar to those at the Chouinard Art Institute. He was surprised to hear that Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, had visited Chouinard between the time that he brought the Bauhaus school to the United States and my arrival at the school. He spoke to the students at that time, but I was in Korea and missed it. Mrs. Chouinard, who founded the school, was ahead of a lot of other art educators, and we all loved her.

Leo Monahan Paper Sculpture
This “12 Hands” color wheel is another of the 24 color wheels in the series.
The repetition without variation of the hands seems simple on first blush but on further examination you will find six more color wheels other than the hands themselves. If you start at any yellow thumb and move right through ten fingers, you will see a ten-color series. I left out two colors in the 12 tone color wheel but I can’t remember which ones and, really, who gives a damn. The colors are tinted to about 80% of full intensity and the arrangement is mounted on black. White tends to diffuse color and black intensifies it. The trout were mounted on white for contrast because the fish are very dark. These are simple considerations but necessary for contextual continuity.

Mocking Birds Mocking Flowers

This piece was one of a twelve-bird calendar series done for Technocell, a German specialty paper company. I think this one, “Mocking Birds Mocking Flowers,” was for the month of May. I don’t know how many flowers there are but I just put on some Mozart, went into automatic mode and cut the damn things. They are all exactly the same and painted intense yellow with a few soft pink accents. Yellow is the most intense of all color. Pure sun! It can be hard to control because of its brilliance but, used as a subtle dimensional background, it works. The leaves are just two steps away on the color wheel, so they don’t visually interfere; they serve to enhance and identify the flowers.

As for the birds, this is one of those ‘watch what the hell you’re doing’ jobs.
I haven’t counted the number of shapes in each, but every bird has the right number. The birds are all the same so I only had to design them once, trace every shape, and cut them seven times. Thank the Force that I designed them all going the same way. These are ‘Leo’ birds and there’s not much that is accurate about them. Everyone believes they’re mocking birds, so I’m happy.

The color combinations on each bird vary and involve fully intense (bright) color. The hues are toned down by adjacent or direct complements and white. For me, I almost never use black, as the combination of color mixed with black makes for flat, lifeless color (although such combinations are occasionally useful for variations in neutral comparisons and is called “shading”).

Technocell took me, and the twelve paper sculptures, to Cologne, Germany, where the company displayed them in its booth at a huge paper and printing ‘messe’. It was the biggest damn show I’d ever seen. Ten of the twelve were purchased the first day. Another went to a designer in Germany and ‘July’ went to the head of Coca Cola in Japan. I got to visit that one while on a workshop trip to Tokyo where I worked with first-year students at the Tokyo Communication Arts schools. (I’ll talk about those trips in later blogs.) The topic was ‘Problems of Creativity’ for first-year art students.

Selling the original art meant that I got paid twice. I love art for money’s sake. There have been requests for sizes, prices and availability and I’m working on that, but most of the art I show is from my archive. In the next segment, I’ll show another color wheel and gallery art that came out of my childhood experience in South Dakota’s Black Hills.

Thanks for visiting with me…

leo