Free Colour - Freedom and Order

Jürgen Opitz - Colour Planner and Architect, Lohmar

Rendering Prismen - Sinnbild der heute erreichten Lösgelöstheit von Farbe, Medium und Stofflichkeit.

In our childhood experiments with watercolour, we have all experienced how the all-too-free handling of everything in the paint box leads to an unattractive, soggy, dirty brown, unpleasant and ultimately discarded sheet of paper. But this experiment also led to the realisation that less can be more, and that there must be rules and strategies of some kind that lead to more satisfying creations with colour.

If you want great things, you have to pull yourself together;
It is in the restriction that the master shows himself,
And the law alone can give us freedom.

J.W.v. Goethe, the Sonnet

Shape always contains a certain order. Nature builds according to a plan - whether one attributes this to a creator, genetics, evolution or the so-called morphogenetic fields - everything is in a relational, orderly and dialectical dialogue. Likewise, human creations are always the result of an ordering spirit. The order of music shows this in an ideal way. Clearly defined, tuned tones take on a new shape in harmony and yet always remain themselves. Despite limitations, learnable harmony rules offer immeasurable freedom in the creation of form and shape.

A new attempt at painting and colour design will therefore logically be a careful selection of a few colours with a sense of harmony and their clever arrangement, which will make a statement that is perceived as "coherent" both formally and in terms of colour.

This sentence, however, conceals thousands of years of evolutionary history that are worth becoming aware of in order to realise that we are now at a long-desired point of enormous freedom with regard to the possibilities of dealing with colours.

Restriction and exemption

For a long time, the restriction of the material, the pigment, the colouring agent was at the same time the brake for the visual cognition and systematic order.

Soot and earths of the cave painters offered a small but fine palette. In antiquity, the metal oxides were added. Countless wars were fought over copper deposits, not least because of the suitability of copper oxides as colouring agents. The desire of the clients of medieval painters' workshops for increased colourfulness was above all economically limited. Lapis lazuli, for example, was priced in gold. Purple was even more expensive.

A real evolutionary step was taken in the middle of the 19th century with aniline dyes. For the first time, all conceivable colour appearances could be produced from almost the same basic material (coal tar) and were thus of equal value and affordable for everyone. But also indifferent. The new freedom was too much for many (colourful cities of the 19th century).

Painting experienced an evolutionary thrust with the invention of tube colours, which enormously increased the pace of application and thus also of knowledge. Today, modern printing inks, mixing stations and the display on computer screens are the signs of the complete availability of colours, completely freed from restrictions in the fabric.

Law

Each further development with regard to the availability of colouring agents led to new observations and findings. Thus, today there is a multitude of colour theories and classification systems that strive to compile the knowledge gained and to provide colour users with the greatest possible support in their creative use of colour. In particular, the identification and clear communication of colour phenomena is important for the further development of the (division of labour) colour culture.

Unfortunately, the systems that exist today only partially complement each other or openly contradict each other. There will always be differences of opinion, but here it often seems that system differences are definitely cultivated as a business model by companies specialising in this. Some available tools turn out to be deliberately limited sales aids for products with a customer loyalty strategy. And in this sense, even the free exchange of information is prevented by means of patent law restrictions.

Free colour

The initiative Free colour would like to bring to full fruition the freedom of information, communication and realisation of colour already achieved for the benefit of the further development of colour culture.

The ubiquitous availability of computers today, with their fast and precise ability to represent, analyse and communicate colour, is of particular importance. Highly developed, intelligent design freedoms still offer much new territory for designs to be explored.

A task still to be solved is to free the realisation in the material from self-imposed, often company-political restrictions of the industry. "What you see is what you get", the former advertising slogan of Microsoft, is still waiting to be redeemed in reality.

No new inventions are necessary to achieve these goals. A solution is already possible today for every technical problem. Everything is already there, it just needs to be used and demanded beforehand.

Jürgen Opitz 2015
http://www.architekt-opitz.de