Running Through Sheets

Dear Reader,

Did’ja ever run past Mrs. Tackaberry’s house where the Chow Chow dogs charge the fence to eat kids? Then run down the sidewalk into the Thompsons’ big backyard where clotheslines are strung all over, and the bright, white sheets are waving like sails and the colored clothes are snapping in the wind?

We ran with arms outstretched through the sheets as they wafted over us. Then Mrs. Thompson, who worked all Monday, washday, to get the clothes out in the sun, would chase us away.

Hot day, boys running
Into wind-whipped, bright white sheets.
Dodging colored clothes.

We lived a mile high in the Black Hills and the air was clean, the sky pure blue, and the grass bright green. The sky, the grass, and those colored clothes whipping and snapping in the wind are my early memories of color.

Clothespins and clotheslines,
Smooth, clean sheets across my face.
Smell of fresh laundry. 

Rhino Color Wheel

The rhino color wheel was designed like a child’s toy, and the center “fan” is an intense but dark color wheel of primary and secondary colors. The horns are also of high intensity but isolated and brighter; they’re like handles for throwing the toy in a game.

I start each blog with a color wheel because, for me, it symbolizes the Bauhaus, about which Mies van der Rohe said: “The fact that it was an idea, I think, is the cause of this enormous influence the Bauhaus had on every progressive school around the globe.
Only an idea spreads so far.”

I was five years old when running through the sheets and didn’t know, or care, that the Bauhaus had been closed for five years and many of the famous instructors had fled Germany to America, where they re-opened the school.

Twenty years later, I was immersed in Johannes Itten’s color system, refined by Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Josef Albers, who fortunately organized it into a cohesive method. I have studied, taught and used this system for the past 55 years, and it allows me to organize, innovate, experiment, and be more than happy with the surprising results.

Abstract #1

This nostalgic image is my version of Mrs. Thompson’s backyard. Full of color and white sheets, all waving, and snapping in the wind on a hot, clear summer day.

I cut a couple hundred shapes from museum (mat) board, without a plan or intention, and put them aside. Later, I paint them in many colors, again not knowing how I’ll use them, and put them away in a box.

When I get around to assembling them into a composition, it’s like I’ve found a treasure trove that someone has prepared for me. I move the colored shapes around for a couple of days and finally glue them down and varnish them for protection.

Feathers in the Wind

In my art I try to tell stories about seasons, conditions of age, heat, cold, and, in this case, wind. The feathers are old, nearly blown apart by the wind, left behind, and are somewhere where no one ever sees them. They’re fugitive, and they’ll be gone soon.

Old feathers out there,
Torn apart by the hot wind.
Are past life’s treasure.

I used a number of techniques in this sculpture. I painted a heavy, impasto background, brushing, sponging, splattering, and oxidizing the various elements. As before, I cut, manipulated, painted, and assembled them, in that order. It’s always a challenge and
an adventure.

Hands covered with paint.
Thrilled by color on paper.
I need a bourbon.

I’m never content with what I know,
only with what I can find out. 

Thanks for visiting me…

leo

Rhino Color Wheel is $1000.

The abstract is $500.  A similar one, Clouds, is available at the Cut, Bend, Fold, ColorColorColor exhibit at the Grovewood Gallery.
Japanese Maples in the Wind is $2,450 and is at the Cut, Bend, Fold, ColorColorColor exhibit at the Grovewood Gallery.

Color Wheels

Dear reader,

I hope you all realize that “leothecolorman.com” is tongue in cheek. Getting a domain name using the word color is next to impossible, so “leothecolorman.com” it is. This is not a course in color; however, it is a venue to discuss the use of basic design and color in my work.

I began studying design and color in the 1950s. After four years in the Navy during the Korean War, I attended the Chouinard Art Institute, in Los Angeles,
on the GI Bill and the Disney scholarship. The iconic William Moore was teaching what I have come to know as the Bauhaus foundation course. Johannes Itten launched the course in 1919. Although there are a number of color systems available, Itten’s 12-approach to color is one of the best. It has the virtue of being simple and direct.

He defined that approach in his tremendous book The Art of Color. (Van Nostrand Reinhold, publisher.) After Itten left the Bauhaus, Paul Klee and eventually Kandinsky taught there. The Nazis closed the school in 1933 and, by coincidence, that was the year I was born.

When I entered Chouinard in 1954, Bob Winquist was also teaching the color and design course. I was a frog in the right puddle at Chouinard and ‘caught on’ to the difficult course. Bob had flown some 36 missions as a belly gunner in B17s, over Germany and didn’t always feel like coming to work, so he would ask me to fill in. As a result, I was a regular instructor during my final year and four years after graduation.

I got hooked on teaching but my time in the classroom was sporadic because I went into the design business at Studio Five with three partners. If you go to leomonahan.com, you can see the rest of my business bio, which includes the sequence of events in my paper sculpture career as an illustrator and in fine art. What is fine art, you ask? The late Neil Boyle, an illustrator and fine art painter, as well as my classmate, colleague, and close friend, said “Fine-art is an illustration with a frame around it.”

During my teaching years at Chouinard, USC, Disney Imagineering, CalArts, and the Chouinard Foundation Art School, I must have assigned or painted hundreds of boring, very technical color wheels. I figured that there must be more dynamic possibilities for the color wheel. So over a couple of years I designed and painted 24 paper sculpture color wheels with a different subject each time.
I’ve sold all but six in shows. I’m amazed at what people will buy because I was just having fun, with what was for me, an original concept.

6 faces color wheelAlong with other work, I will show and talk about each of my color wheels as blogs go by. The Faces logo for this blog is one of them. This one was a briar patch, but I had to finish it because I liked the concept. The six faces are tinted primary and secondary colors. The circular head-pieces are tinted color wheels, each head having a different color in the center and moving out through the spectrum. This was a ‘measure thrice, paint once’, proposition. I really had to focus to know where I was in the process.

I cut each shape with an x-acto knife then masked and painted them with an airbrush without once making a mistake. Designing it was interesting but the finish was just pick and shovel work. At this time in my life, I don’t think I’d do it again. I’ve moved to the world of loosey-goosey.

Color WhalesOne of my favorites is “Color Whales,” because I do love a pun. Six Killer Whales are arranged in a circle with their bellies painted in tinted primary and secondary colors, yellow, red, blue, orange, violet, green, to contrast with the black bodies. As we go along, I’ll talk about the many ways of neutralizing color; tinting is one of them.

Not to be a smart ass or anything, but if a designer can’t draw, well, you’ll have a helluva time using a computer to make these shapes in dimension. As an illustrator, I’m a designer, but knowing how to draw has never been an impediment. Cranky old fart that I am, I love computers and use them daily but not to make art in dimension. During the 45 years that I operated design studios, it was pastel and marker comps, illustration, photos, paste-ups, color seps and film, film, lotsa film. Also, someone pointed out to me that computers don’t have ideas. You have to get your own ideas and use this fast idiot to develop them. What took us days or weeks now takes seconds to accomplish.

These blogs will be about the basic design and color theory that I taught and use in my images. I’ll only describe my work because, as an ‘excrementist’, I don’t know shit about how others think. So it goes…welcome.

In the next blog I’ll show another color wheel and will explain the complex color ideas in an illustration of birds that I did for a German paper company…. leo