Chromosphere: The Color Theory Podcast

Guardian website: Do you see blue or green? This viral test plays with color perception

Colour Literacy Project: Resources

Science How Stuff Works: Earth's Oldest Color was Pink

Martin Bricelj Baraga (cyanometer art installation): Cyanometer

Color categories in thought and language, edited by C. L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi. Cambridge University Press, New York: 1997

Encyclopedia of Color Science and technology (UC Irvine): World Color Survey

Space.com: Parsec

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Sharing a project I designed based upon Mary Gartside and Emily Noyes Vanderpoel's color methodologies. Try it for yourself, or with a class.

Link to project description (Google Doc):

Color Project: Mary Gartside and Emily Noyes Vanderpoel 

Link to video of presentation on Gartside and Vanderpoel's methodologies (on Vimeo):

MCAD 2022 Faculty Biennial Forum Presentation by Ed Charbonneau

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Color and Emotion, the topic of a 5-week online course I have  designed and will be teaching in March/April 2025 for the Continuing Education Department of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Color and Emotion: Experience and Aesthetic Awareness
Online course, five weeks
Wednesday evenings
March 5 - April 9 (off March 19)
7-9:30 pm CT
Course website

Mark Rothko at MoMA

Michelangelo Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo Doni Tondo, Uffizi Galleries

Coca-Cola and Santa Claus

Crane bathroom tiles and fixtures

Auntie Mame, 1958 Movie Trailer

The Velvet Underground, Who Loves the Sun, Loaded, 1970

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Welcome to Season 4!

Lost and Found: Abbott Thayer and The Study of Camouflage. Martin Stevens 

Dazzle Camouflage. Wikipedia

Neuroanatomy, Retina. Navid Mahabadi and Yasir Al Khalil, NIH, Aug. 8, 2023

The Confetti Illusion: This optical illusion tricks you into seeing different colors. How does it work? Nicoletta Lanse, Live Science, May 19, 2021

The ‘Confetti Illusion’ Makes Fruit Appear Riper Than It Really Is. Katharina Menne, Scientific American, Aug. 19, 2024 

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The final episode of Season 3. A reflection on the past three seasons.


The Book of Colour Concepts, Alexandra Loske and Sarah Lowengard, Taschen 2024

Color Theory: A Critical Introduction, Aaron Fine, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021

Magenta + Green = Blue? Instagram video reel

Black Flag, TV Party, 1982

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Interview with Gamma Jeanne; a departure from our more in-depth discussions of color theory. Jeanne's career as an artist spans over nine decades and includes working with acrylic paints in the 1940s and being at the center of department store design in the 1950s. Our conversation is wide-ranging as it addresses an artist's inner drive to create and form connections with people.

Relevant links:

The Terrazzo Jungle
By Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker
March 7, 2004

Victor Gruen; Gruen Associates
Southdale Center
Edina, Minnesota, USA

Gruen (formerly The Gruen Transfer)
Australian Broadcast Corporation

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CNN online article: Wear red and green to experience the Purkinje effect during the total solar eclipse

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Luanne Stovall is an artist and color theorist with an MFA in painting from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She attended the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture (New York City), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, Maine).

Luanne is a member of the Steering Committee of the global Colour Literacy Project and a visiting lecturer in the School of Design and Creative Technologies at the University of Texas in Austin. Currently she is teaching Color Literacy as an upper level interdisciplinary course in the School of Design and Creative Technologies at the University of Texas at Austin. 

She has taught color courses and workshops in many locations including UT Austin, The Contemporary Austin; School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Wellesley College, MA; and MIT Sloan School of Business. Her paintings and works on paper have been exhibited widely, and are in private and public collections, including the Art Museum of South Texas; El Paso Museum of Art; Blanton Museum, Austin, TX; Moakley Cancer Care Center, Boston; and the Estee Lauder Collection.

Luanne’s website:
https://www.luannestovall.com/

The Colour Literacy Project, Steering Committee member:
https://colourliteracy.org/

Inter-Society Color Council, Board of Directors member; Team leader, Fluorescent Fridays
https://www.iscc.org/

2023 International Colour Association (AIC), volume 33,
Special issue on contributions by the Colour Literacy Project Team:
https://aic-color.org/journal-issues

Luanne's contribution to the 2023 AIC volume 33:
Prologue: one artist's journey from traditional colour theory to the Colour Literacy Project (PDF)

University of Texas Color Literacy course
Designed as four modules:

• Color Perception
• Color Interaction
• Color Psychology
• Color Design / Portfolio Project.

University website: AET Courses (Search under the Upper Division tab.)

Flower Color Theory, by Darroch and Michael Putnam

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A conversation with Jon Rieschl. Please find additional resources to this episode here.

Jon Reischl is a visual artist and designer specializing in mixed-media and oil painting. He has shown work locally in the Twin Cities and the greater metro area as well as regionally at venues throughout the Midwest. 

A graduate of St. Paul’s College of Visual Arts (RIP), He works out of Rock 9 Art Studio, located in the heart of the Creative Enterprise Zone. Jon lives on St. Paul’s East Side with his lovely wife Debra and their trusty beagle.

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Sebastián Wilson is a photographer living in Santiago, Chile. He studied architecture which has a clear influence on his work both on the graphic sense, and on the way he observes and portrays light. For links and resources related to this episode, please see the Chromosphere episode webpage.

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Dr. David Briggs has been teaching classes on colour for more than 20 years, and currently teaches colour, drawing and painting at the National Art School and the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.  For links and resources related to this episode, please see the Chromosphere episode webpage.

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I interview painter Jeremy Szopinski who is a good friend and longtime studio mate. For more information about the podcast and Jeremy's artworks, check out this website link.

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The final episode of Season 2; includes a correction to the Mary Gartside episode from Season 1. The first version of this episode erroneously stated a connection between Mary Gartside and the writing of Johann von Goethe. This new episode was recorded as a correction and published on April 24, 2023.

Mary Gartside was a painter, teacher, and color theorist who lived in England from 1755-1819. More information about Gartside can be found at: The Winterthur Museum's Program in American Material Culture, Sussex Research Online, and Medium.

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Part one of a reading of an essay I am writing, Focal Points and the Roots of Abstraction.

Human color vision adapts to the changing environment in many ways. Pupils dilate and constrict in order to regulate the amount of light entering the eye. The lens either bunches up or flattens out to change its shape while focusing light wavelengths along the spectral band at different proximities to the retina. Cone cells, and other light sensitive cells, perform plus-or-minus gains in activity to achieve what is known as color constancy, allowing humans to maintain a persistent perception of colors within changing light sources. Adaptations such as these take place at different rates of time, some more quickly than others; some more involuntarily than others, which may relate to how focal points form and dissipate within a visual field. This essay explores how adaptations of the visual system may generate focal points, and how representing light as colors informed the roots of abstraction.

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Are nearly all the cars and trucks in your area either red, white, gray, or black? Discussion of red colors pairing to neutral colors as a color scheme.

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A review of a listener letter.

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A walk through the grocery store in search of the analogous split-complementary color scheme as well as other palettes.

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Part 3 of 3: The final installment, A New Canon, places the work of color theorists, Mary Gartside and Emily Noyes Vanderpoel in historical context so as to examine how their inclusion (and by extension, additional underrepresented color theorists and practitioners) may help us to understand how we may expand our contemporary approaches to color usage in all creative visual fields. 

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Part 2 of 3. In this episode, I read the middle portion of an essay I have written, which could become a chapter in a future publication.  (Read in three parts.)

Abstract:
This essay charts how the term harmony came to be used by European and North American artists, designers, and educators as a qualitative descriptor of color usage and design. Originating in metaphysics and philosophy in BCE Greece as a method to link the functioning of the five senses, including color vision, the concept entered into the vernacular of design via architecture during the Italian Renaissance. Throughout the 19th and early 20th Centuries, theorists and educators claimed the authority to define objective harmonies in color usage and design; forming methodologies that have been ubiquitous in practice over the past 100 years. 

The final section of the essay, A New Canon, places the work of color theorists, Mary Gartside and Emily Noyes Vanderpoel in historical context so as to examine how their inclusion (and by extension, additional underrepresented color theorists and practitioners) may help us to understand how we may expand our contemporary approaches to color usage in all creative visual fields. 

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