The Broad Strokes
One of the first things to notice about my work is the use of industrial paint. Industrial paints (or commercial house paints) are not created equal. There are numerous different types which all have their own purpose. There are sealers, primers, water-based acrylics, water-based enamels, oil-based enamels, paint designed only for exterior surfaces, and some for interior surfaces only or sometimes for both purposes. There are varnishes for woods, dust coats for concrete, intumescent coatings (fire resistant coatings), and conductive paints. On top of this there are the lower quality tradeline paints and the cream of the crop retail paints. This affords me the opportunity to experiment with many types of products. Testing their limits through unconventional application, and also by deliberately trying them out in ways which they were not designed for.
Industrial paints are designed to work on very specific substrates: Substrates like plaster, Gib, weatherboard, wood and various metals. Playing with the idea of ‘good’ painting in terms of a professional decorator, it makes sense to me that my work should exist on substrates like these. These supports are where commercial paint successes and failures commonly take place. Yet traditionally, these types of substrates do not equate to the creation of what counts as ‘good quality’ painting in the fine art mode of understanding. Canvas, or historically linen along with expensive highly pigmented artist paints are commonly thought of as the superior paints to use when creating a painted piece of fine art. I find using alternate materials such as gib and industrial coatings provide me with more opportunity to create in a more emergent and experimental way. There is an element of science in my way of working. By this I mean a curiosity in what an industrial product can do when it is put into a situation it was not intended for. At times, my practice feels like building a library or encyclopaedia of unexpected outcomes. Painting on common industrial substrates like Gib creates a clear reference to painting as a trade juxtaposed to painting as an art practice. This creates tension within the work as the different painting languages compete to dominate what is valued within the painting. The support adds to the painting in a productive sense, instead existing silently as canvas often does
James J. Gibson’s thoughts on the theory of affordances have had some influence on my practice. Gibson says;
The psychologists assume that objects are composed of their qualities. But I now suggest that what we perceive when we look at objects are their affordances, not their qualities. We can discriminate the dimensions of difference if required to do so in an experiment, but what the object affords us is what we normally pay attention to.
To me this directly relates to what industrial materials could give my painting. In contextual terms it brings in a conversation about our perceived value of objects. It is important to me that the whole painting be delivering the message of the work. Canvas is silent when reading a traditional stretched painting, but to me the support is a chance to add to the conversation which the work is initiating. Industrial substrates such as Gib add meaning, and another layer of visual language to the painting. Some would argue that it is not necessary if the paint itself communicates all that is needed to understand the message, but having a support which in itself is as important as the paint on its surface in initiating ideas moves the painting from being solely a painting into being a painted object. In this way, I am harnessing all that my industrial materials can afford to my work.
There is a book at Resene, (a New Zealand owned commercial paint shop), called the Pictorial Field Guide, which is used by staff to diagnose commercial paint problems. Within this book there are detailed diagrams and in-depth explanations as to what caused the problem, how to avoid the problem in future and most importantly, how to fix it. I am currently studying this field guide to understand what causes paint to ‘fail’, and what it actually means for both paint and paintings to fail. It could be argued that in a housing context, paint has failed when it is no longer protecting the substrate as it was intended. This could look like peeling, pitting, cracking, bubbling or splitting, and could be caused by either user error or a production line fault. In contrast, when paint fails in fine art, it is arguably a more complicated matter. When reading a painted artwork, everything must be assumed to be intentional, and so if the paint on a painting is doing something unintended, that in itself could constitute failure. There are many facets to what comprises a successful artwork, the most reliable difference of the two types of painting failures could be that it is easy to tell when a paint job has failed, which is not always the case when reading a painting.
Colour
Colour choice in an interior design sense is of interest to me, as an adjacent area of exploration within the practice. I currently source all my paint from the paint recycling bins at Westgate Resene. Resene has a paint recycling system called “Paint-Wise”, which is where people drop off their unwanted, leftover paint to their closest branch. A large proportion of the paint returned is usable, and most of this doesn’t end up being used, although some is mixed together and repurposed to cover graffiti. The reason I use recycled paint is that it directly correlates to the current colour trends in the area. Each bucket and tin brought back represents a colour choice that someone made for their domestic or commercial space. From what people discard it’s simple to deduce what was painted, whether it was inside or outside and then of course, the colour it was painted. I think of the paint bins as an archeological dig into colour trends stretching from recent times all the way back into decades past. Most tins brought back are labelled with their respective colour names and date of tint.
From observation most people are choosing to paint their interior walls an off-white. I find it interesting that the majority of people bringing back paint prefer to keep their homes relatively colourless. Blacks, greys, and natural wood colours are trending for exterior cladding while sterile whites dominate our interiors. The most common off-white colours have names like: Alabaster, Black White, Sea Fog, Barely There, House White and White Pointer. Resene, like many commercial paint brands, has its own colour-naming system, where each shade is separated, segmented and then labelled. For example, there isn’t a colour ‘red’, but there is ‘red hot’, red red red’ and Jalapeno. Each shade is subtly different from the next and advertised to achieve different moods, or effects. Colour in a commercial setting is displayed as a list of separately-named, isolated hues, which is in stark contrast to the colour wheel in which each colour falls into the next as part of a continuum.
In the Interior Design framework, colour has a heavy influence in the success of a design. Dark colours can make a space cosier; lighter colours open out a space. There are analogous colour schemes, achromatic and monochromatic schemes, triadic, complementary and split complementary schemes. For colour to fail within this framework, the colours would not have to fit neatly into one of these schemes. Alternatively, the colours would conflict with each other from an ‘emotional’ standpoint. For example, painting a bedroom bright orange would not make it a relaxing place to sleep due to the apparent energising effect of the colour. Another way colour could fail in this context, was if it was placed in the wrong place within the space to achieve an outcome which was not intended. For example, if you wanted the room to look bigger, yet the ceiling was painted a dark ashy blue, this would be an interior design colour failure. This is because darker colours have a weightier feel to them, and to put them up high creates a more enclosed feeling.
Looking into colour choices, I became aware of the Kainga Ora colour palette. Kainga Ora, (formerly Housing New Zealand), is New Zealand’s social housing provider, and is a crown agency. Resene has a partnership with Kainga Ora which enforces that all Kainga Ora. houses are painted with Resene’s paint, and with a limited palette of Resene colours. The Kainga Ora colour palette is very institutional and dim. Interior walls are painted Half Spanish White (a yellow/creamy white), Half Fossil (a pinky beige), or Quarter Wheatfield (another beige), with a plain, untinted, white ceiling. This dull palette choice was chosen to make buying in bulk easier, as well as streamlining and simplifying renovations between tenants.
This is in stark contrast with Karen Walker branded colours, which Resene also sells. Karen Walker is a renowned fashion designer who lives and works in New Zealand. Her colour charts are advertised to be inspired by Bauhaus and are advertised to be emotionally grouped together rather than tonally. Each of her colour charts are supposedly composed to tell a story, which in keeping with the ‘Karen Walker Style’, plays with combining opposites. For example, one chart could be described as calming and another as energising. Her testpots are a dollar more expensive because they come in a box, also Karen Walker Chalk Paints can only be tinted a colour from one of her designer palettes. This suggests that colour choice can indicate class in some instances, but not in all. This is because having the ability to change a colour scheme indicates that the individual owns the house, has capital and is not renting., but that individual could still choose one of the Kainga Ora colours if that suits their design scheme. Is the white wall popular in New Zealand because it goes with everything, or because of tall poppy syndrome and the cultural desire to be like everyone else?
Colour to me, feels like an underdog. It has the power to cause paint failures and successes within the interior design, commercial painting and fine art. Colour in some instances can indicate social status and an awareness of current design trends. To historical figures such as Immanual Kant, colour has been thought of as secondary to form and construction, “The colours ... enliven the object for sensation, but make it really worth looking at and beautiful they cannot” I argue that colour has an equal bearing on the success or failure of a painting no matter the discipline.
Readings
My curiosity around commercial and domestic colour choice initially led me to thinkers like David Batchelor who is a well known Scottish artist and writer. Batchelor’s book Chromophobia, explores the phenomenon of what Batchelor calls Chromophobia, which he defines as the fear of contamination through colour. He argues that the feminine, the foreign and the infantile are all associated with colour in the West, which relagates them to the category of the superficial. Batchelor analyses the occurrence of chomophobia in Western history through its artists, philosophers and authors. Some of these thinkers and artists are: the late Dave Hickey, (a critic), Roland Barthes, (french essayist), Aldous Huxley, (english writer and philosopher), Edwin Abbott Abbott, (theologian), Herman Melville, (the author of Moby Dick) and Immanual Kant who was one of the central figures involved in The Age of Enlightenment. According to Batchelor, “To fall out of colour is to run out of words.” He reasons this indescribable phenomenon could be due to the fact that colour is so indivisible. Humans can distinguish several million different colours. This being so, English has only eleven general colour names: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey. Issac Newton divided the rainbow of light into seven as he loved musical harmonies, and there are seven distinct notes in a musical scale. This is only one person’s deduction of colour categorisation
Batchelor’s book led me to a series of other authors and thinkers whose ideas influenced my decision making in the studio. Thinkers like Aldous Huxley, who was a philosopher and whose writings were unique in their time because of their integration of both Eastern and Western philosophies. Huxley talked to the issue of colour from a transcendent perspective in his book The Doors of Perception. While on Mescaline, he noticed colours became more intense, and shape and symbolism diminished in their importance. His experiences with psychedelics convinced him that black and white symbolism was a human phenomenon, where colour and the enjoyment of colour came from a more primal place, which he called the antipodes. Huxley talks about the power of colour in artworks, in particular, a colour’s ability to transport the viewer’s mind to the antipodes. “Consequently works of art painted in bright, pure colours are capable, in suitable circumstances, of transporting the beholder’s mind in the direction of the antipodes.” He juxtaposes this idea with the lack of desire for colour in our modern world. The reason for this, according to Huxley, is the fact that we are oversaturated by colour today “What was once a needle of visionary delight has now become a piece of disregarded linoleum.”
I began to think about colour’s relationship to perspective and beauty. Books like The Invisible Dragon by Dave Hickey influenced me to think on the vernacular of beauty, and where that could belong in the realms of Fine Art, Interior Design and commercial stores like Resene. Vernacular, meaning in this instance, the colloquial speech associated with beauty. Dave Hickey was an American art critic who published in spaces like The Rolling Stone, ARTnews and Artforum, In Hickey’s opinion, beauty is lacking as a point of discussion within institutional academia as a hard contextual concept, and when brought up for debate in these types of spaces, the conversation often drifts to the art market versus beauty’s conceptual bearing on an artwork. This is due to the reality that beauty sells, so when one brings up the subject, conversation often travels to what is selling versus what beauty affords an artwork in a critical framework of thinking. Hickey believes it boils down to one thing, and that thing is the fact that “Beauty sells”. He compares his grandmother’s prejudice against those in trade to those with high social standing, as a parallel to those artists who position themselves squarely against beauty to be seen as a serious endeavour. He argues, “Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells something else, it is a seductive advertisement.” Hickey believes the greatest works of art have both an idolatrous quality, while also selling a concept. He ends this section by posing a question: “Is the institution itself not a marketplace?”
All of these thoughts crossover and interlink, adding their own flavour to the question, ‘What does it mean for a painting to fail?’ Alongside questions around what the materiality of paint itself is doing to fail or succeed, colour, in its own right, can determine whether paint fails in an interior design sense, and also in a fine art context. Highly pigmented colours made by distinguished brands are preferred over industrial coatings from a conservationists perspective. But does the ability to preserve a painting equate to a painting success? What constitutes a paint failure in fine art and how does that differ from professional decorating and interior design? These questions are nodes of inquiry, none of which have black and white answers. I hope to unveil some facets of this conversation through the making of my work.
To conclude, I am using my knowledge of house paint to test its material limits, while problem solving surface and aestheticising unconventional application with the trending colours found in paint recycling bins. I am thinking through the unique affordances of both paints and substrates while also investigating current colour trends.
Bibliography
Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.
Batchelor, David. Chromophobia. Reaktion Books, 2000.
Blaszczyk, Regina L. "Chromophilia: The Design World's Passion for Colour." Journal of Design History 27, no. 3 (2014): 203-217. Accessed February 28, 2023. https;//eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/93592.
Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
Hickey, Dave. “Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty.” In The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, 29-63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Huxley, Aldous. “Heaven and Hell.” In The Doors of Perception, 44-76. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009.