Colour Relationships and Sonia Delaunay
‘Colour is the skin of the world’
Sonia Delaunay – abstract artist (Tate, London)
‘About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Russian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings.’
Sonia Delaunay was an abstract artist who was interested in Simultanism:
Simultanism is the strand of Orphism practised by the Delaunays. The name comes from the work of French scientist Michel Eugène Chevreul who identified the phenomenon of ‘simultaneous contrast’, in which colours look different depending on the colours around them. For example, a grey will look lighter on a dark background than it does on a light one. The Delaunays dispensed with form and aimed to created rhythm, motion and depth through overlapping patches of vibrant hues.
Playing with primary and secondary colours to explore simultaneous contrast in our work…
This week students used Sonia Delaunay’s costume designs as inspiration to explore shape and colour and colour relationships.
Students examined primary colours, secondary colours and complementary colours as well as the way colours react with one another and the effect of simultaneous contrast.
We used paint to explore shape and colour and the relationships between colours…
Students worked in pairs to explore colour mixing. They used Sonia Delaunay’s costume designs as inspiration for their colour character.
Here are some of the Prep students colour exploration paintings…
The following week , we used the medium of collage to further explore colour relationships and experiment with the relationships between primary and secondary colours. Here students developed ideas for their costume design using shape and colour to build the idea of a character…
