Johannes Itten, Master of Color
“He who wants to become a master of color must see, feel, and experience each individual color in its many endless combination with all other colors,” Itten once wrote. “Colors must have a mystical capacity for spiritual expression, without being tied to objects.”
Born in the late 1800′s Johannes was a painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist from Switzerland. Itten, the author of The Art of Color and a color-theory teacher a Bauhaus, is most known for his theory of considering the subjective feelings associated with objective colors. Red being a “warm” color and blue being “cool” are examples of the effect Itten had on our understanding of color. Itten felt that we bring our own subjectivity to colors, apart from those commonly associated with them. He also discovered that color harmony is quite individual and subjective as well.
Feeling that the traditional color wheel was too short-sighted, he developed a new color “star” which took into effect more hues than the previous 12-hue wheel. When it was all said and done he concluded that the world of color and the influence it had on humanity, both collectively and individually, was a deep mystery.
“If it be imagined that this systematic classification of colors and contrasts banishes all difficulties, I should add that the kingdom of colors has within it multidimensional possibilities only partly to be reduced to simple order. Each individual color is a universe in itself. We must therefore content ourselves with an exposition of fundamentals.”
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