I am sitting down trying to write this post and I look across to see what song has just come on, and I misread the title of the song. I read ‘Troubles of the World’ as ‘Troubles of the Word’. Rather fitting and wondering if it was a subconscious move.

Somehow working on this post is harder than the first. As promised from the previous post, I want to dedicate this entry to colour. Even now as I sit at a desk to write, I want to get up straight away, I just can’t seem to sum up the words. Why is it that one of the things I am passionate about I can’t seem to write about. I have accumulated many notes, but when it comes to writing about colour in my practice, a big fat wall comes crashing down. Perhaps writing will help. I have come to realise this post will have to be the beginning of an investigation into the process of my colour work, as when I try to fit everything into one post it becomes overwhelming. I think I need to do this in small chunks.

Form, shape and colour. Creating, collecting, archiving. These are the words that spin in my mind when I think about my practice. Sometimes people say drawing a mind map helps, and sometimes I do. Here is one I did this month, and it points out further how stuck I am. It didn’t help me materialize a structure, but again more questions on how to bring them together.  I keep researching on colour and, instead of writing, I keep making notes.

Slowly over the last 2-3 years I have been building a wider knowledge surrounding colour. And it all stems from colour printing in the darkroom. I have recently expanded this to colour in pigments, but maybe that will be a follow up post. The more I printed colour, the more I wanted to understand what was happening in the process. I started reading more books and found a process called trichromatic photography.

Trichromatic photography is accomplished through colour separation of the negatives. A scene is shot three times onto black and white film with a coloured filter over the lens. One through a red filter, a second through a green and a third through a blue filter. Once the black and white film is exposed and processed, these negatives are then individually placed into the enlarger and a positive print is made using the red, green and blue filters again. Once the three positive prints are made, cyan (complementary to red), magenta (complementary to green) and yellow (complementary to blue) are then ready to superimpose to create one final colour image.

In the gallery, the first attempt reveals that I didn’t quite align the negatives correctly, but it also shows how the colours form when layered, and I ironically prefer this to the final print. Due to this being my first attempt, I also think the camera moved during one of the exposures, but it was still a rewarding experience. I loved that it took hours to do and you have to stop and take your time. One print takes me around 3 hours to complete and it must all be done in complete darkness. There is something addictive about it that keeps me going.

Here are a few other examples I have completed. I am tending to use trichromatic photography for specific places, for example when I went to Avebury to see the Stone Circle, and The Devil’s Chimney outside Cheltenham . It makes it more of a ritual, and I feel that these places deserve this slow methodical way of capturing them.

This last image was an accident and I truly love it! The negatives were aligned correctly; I just didn’t put the paper in the correct rotation.

Here is an example of how the black and white negatives taken from Avebury & Devil’s Chimney look. I have labelled them RGB, corresponding to what filter I used. It’s tricky to see online but you can see blue and yellow in the trees, and I think this is due to movement of the trees during exposure. It’s not a perfect colour balanced print, but I think that is to be expected as there are so many variables to go wrong. If I try and shift the color slightly it can completely go the other way.

Doing this process of trichromatic photography, it got me thinking about colour on its own, how the presence (or absence) of light determines what we see. How light waves are absorbed or reflected. I wanted to remove the photographic element and just print pure colour. Now, I can’t explain this fascination other than it’s an obsession for me right now. Maybe the answers will start emerging, the more I work and try to explain my investigations.

CMY Cube
Handprinted contact colour darkroom print.

Colour printing is a subtractive process. This allows almost any colour to be formed by subtracting (absorbing) certain colours from white light using coloured filters and permitting other colours to pass through. The subtractive primary colours are magenta, yellow and cyan. A print is then made when white light is projected through the enlarger. The light is filtered through a combination of magenta, yellow or cyan filters before it reaches the paper. Cyan on a whole is not really used during colour printing as it can be created by the magenta and yellow filters, but that is to not say there aren’t instances where it can be used. For now, let’s just leave it with magenta and yellow.

Anyway, enough technical talk, but I thought it was important to share the process as it is slow and requires a lot of patience and continuous experimenting. My first experiment was to see that if I used only magenta and yellow filters at different intervals for certain time periods, could I get the colour red?

All prints are handprinted in the colour darkroom.

For me to see the colours and their layering fascinates me. It also sends my mind into a whirlwind as to how it all works. It makes sense when reading the science behind colour, but when I see it physically on paper, it bewilders me. It’s a beautiful process combinging time and light and what our senses perceive.

I am in a constant flux of waves where I want to be as far away from the photographic image as possible, which is why I think I have gone abstract with my colours. Then I get pulled back into the image.

Going foward, I want to focus on colour and senses, but I need to find a way to make it sound less technical. Perhaps I need to be patient. As I learn more and let it sit with me for a while, then I might be able to free myself from the constraints of technicality and put my own spin on it.

The more I move forward with colour, the more I am starting to feel balanced. I am interplaying colour with different mediums. It has taken a while to realise my practice is not static. It is constantly flowing like water, As the water flows down, it may pick up more water from other small streams, which I see as branches within my practice, which eventually leads to a lake or the ocean to form a bigger meaning.

Image courtesy of NASA
I  found this image showing what rivers and streams look like from space, which is a great analogy showing branches in an artist’s practice.

For now this is probably enough talk. In my next post I will show how my colour work has developed. I will show more indepth my colour samples that I am creating and my working notebooks that include smaller prints and notations.

Here are some examples.

Page from my one of colour notebooks.