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Kitagawa Utamaro And Paul Gauguin's Use Of Color Techniques

Decent Essays

Describe specifically what the term “arbitrary color” means, a color used at random for objects that have a common color, such as, a tree has green leaves, but we choose to make the leave purple or making the sun black, the clouds green, or the sky yellow, etc.
Who was the first artist to employ the technique? I would have to say Katsushika Hokusai, Kitagawa Utamaro, and And¯o Hiroshige had a role in the technique. The technique was used in And¯o Hiroshige color woodcut print, (“Moon Pine at Ueno from One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo”), (Pg. 27), because of the color use. The colors seem to be out of place, such as, the sky’s appearance being that of black, blue, and green, also the tree appears to have a redder tent than what we would normally see in nature. Hiroshige and other Japanese artists had gotten young artist thinking about color, arbitrary color, and pure color. One of the artist that took the color techniques from color woodcut prints and Japanese prints was Paul Gauguin. Gauguin was truly the first to employ arbitrary color techniques, which can be seen in his (Vision after the Sermon), (Pg. 60), with vivid red paint in the back ground, splashes of green and blue tenting on the nuns faces, these colors are not known in nature, and they are non-descriptive. It just isn’t natural to see these colors placed this way. Thus, Gauguin’s paintings influenced younger artist and affected their ideas in the Nabis and Fauve periods. Later movements adopted this

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