Ook in IJsland heb ik (dit jaar voor het eerst) een lezing en een cursus gegeven, beide in Reykjavik. De aankondiging van de lezing:

LECTURE: AND THE EARTH WAS FLAT
WESTERN ART HISTORY – THE HISTORY OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS

Each period in cultural history has its own perspective on the world and our earthly existence. Enormous changes have taken place in these perspectives over the past, particularly in the last centuries. And in art these changes are eminently visible. That is why in art history you can see the history of our consciousness.

Artists always seem to be in the frontline of new developments. So, what does it tell us when painters start to leave sense-perceptible sea-scapes for austere abstract gestures? What does this say about our contemporary consciousness? 

By addressing these questions, we can gain a more complete understanding of the chaotic present in which we live now. 

Lecture with PowerPoint presentation
Lecturer: Wil Uitgeest
Time: lecture about 1,5 hour; break and conversation afterwards 1 hour

Naast deze lezing heb ik de cursus  COLOUR IS A WAY OF BEING gegeven. Hieronder de handout die bij deze cursus hoorde. Tijdens de cursus hebben we ons verdiept in de kleuren rood en blauw. We deden kleurexperimenten en keken naar het kleurgebruik van met name moderne/hedendaagse kunstenaars. In het schilderen werd geprobeerd om rood en blauw expressief te gebruiken.

Aan de voet van de regenboog? Dettifoss waterval, 44 meter hoog.

COLOUR IS A WAY OF BEING

Colour wheel:
Magenta red, cyan blue and yellow (primary colours)
with their (secondary) mixing colours orangered, green and violetblue.

Magenta, yellow and cyan blue are the basic colours in painting/printing. Togheter with black you can mix all colours with these threm. The colours opposing eachother in the colour wheel are complementary colours; when you look at one colour for a while, your eyes produce the other colour, as an afterimage. Cyan blue-red (magenta+yellow), magenta-green (yellow+cyan blue), yellow-violet (cyan blue+magenta).

Colour, created by the interplay of light and darkness, is a form of energy, and this affects our body functions just as it influences mind and emotion. Colour affects cortical activation (brain waves), functions of the autonomic nervous system and hormonal activity; and colours arouse definite emotional and aesthetic associations. In short: our response to colour is total; it influences us both psychologically and physiologically.

Frank H. Mahnke (1947-2015), president IACC international (information center for colour and environment)

Colour speaks with thousand words. Yellow can be a light that splits the darkness, but it can also express humor, happiness or pain. Red can be courageous as a hero, alarming like a fire or red like the roses you give to your dearest. Blue can be deep as a velvet night, cold like steel or endless like the sky on a cloudless day. Every colour has its own distinct character, and yet it is as versatile and surprising as the human character.

You cannot treat colours as numbers, but you have to see them as individualities, with their own history, their own fate and, as a result, their own tasks.

Heinrich Frieling (1910-1996), colour researcher