I’m a colorist. “Colorist” has been appropriated by those who adjust color in films or add color to graphic novels (translation: comic books). But it fundamentally refers to anyone who uses color to achieve an effect. Or in most cases just loves color.

I had a student who painted super-realist paintings, usually in a series and of a specific subject. Portraits, people with their cars, nineteenth century buildings. The subjects of these incredibly detailed images were so varied I asked him what most interested him. He said, “The colors. I just see colors.” His realism wasn’t about making a subject feel alive by using super detail; it was about the color he saw in the super detail. He was a colorist.

Many of the painters who paint abstractly are colorists. They are free of the restrictions of “autobiographical” color. Mark Rothko was a colorist. JMW Turner, the “Painter of Light,” was a colorist. The Impressionists were all colorists.

When I paint, I care much more about the color of what I’m painting than in the thing I’m painting. When I look at a flower or a piece of wood or a painting, I see color first. Millions of colors. My color perception was tested when I was in high school. I have no idea why. My art teacher just sent me downtown to the department of education to take a series of tests. Later he showed me the results and explained them to me. He explained the results, not their significance. That seems odd, as I think about it, but at fourteen I didn’t expect anything to have a significance. I’m not sure I even knew the difference between facts and their significance as any particular thing.

What I do remember was that on one test they had shown me long trays of little round buttons of wood painted black. In the center of each one were smaller circles of color leaving a rim of black. Each spot of color, from one end of the tray to the other, was infinitesimally different from the one next to it. Or rather they were when I finished. The buttons were mixed up when placed in front of me. I had to sort them—red to red-red orange in the first tray, orange-red-orange to red-orange in the second, etc. The lamp over the trays looked like something from a doctor’s office and the tester sat very quietly, doing nothing. The silence was bit much. I don’t remember that she even breathed.

There were a lot of trays. I didn’t have time to count them but from the color wheel I knew it was probably eighteen. The interesting thing about color is seeing one color in contrast to another, how one becomes the other as they run together, and how many colors there are, for example, in a shadow. In this test there was none of that.

In my memory there were dozens of little pegs in each color range. Not the 10 million, thankfully, that would represent all the colors a normal person might be able to see, but a lot. When I finished each tray, she would turn over all the buttons, look at the numbers on the bottom, and make notes on a form. Later I learned from a psychologist that she should have waited until the end to do this because it might have influenced my behavior if I had know she was making notes or had looked at some buttons more carefully than others. I don’t think it did. I’m hard to influence. Some say impossible.

When my art teacher showed me the results, I had made two mistakes. Those two mistakes still bother me. How with all that work had I finally been so careless as to make two mistakes? Maybe I had made them in the beginning before I realized how much attention the test would take. Or in the blue-blue-greens that were a bit darker than the other colors. I got careless. I’ve wondered about that for over fifty years. Two mistakes. And I never knew what they were. Realistically, considering everything, I knew I did pretty well, although I have no basis of comparison. “Excellent” couldn’t be dog food.

I take no credit for whatever color vision I have; it’s just the equipment I was born with. But it probably accounts for my sensitivity to colors—I can see them.

All that is the long way around to recommending an inexpensive software program: Color Schemer.  A complete waste of time that allows you to make little squares of color and arrange them in palettes, all lined up, without wasting any paint. Even more fabulous is the quality of the color. On a computer screen color is instant and luminous. It doesn’t take 45 coats of thin glazes to get a rich pale blue.

The program will also take samples of the colors in any image on your screen and reproduce them. And most amazingly it creates analogous splits, angled accents, complements, smooth gradients, shades, soft blends, rectangle shades, semi-circle blends, mono comps, and tetrad blends. I have not a clue what an angled accent or tetrad blend is but my original palette is transformed into 20 or so radiant prisms of perfectly calibrated colors. It is fabulous.

Once you have a palette of colors you like, you can name it and save it. In paint, this would be much more difficult. You can always save a palette, putting dabs of color on a swatch of paper, but unless you use premixed colors, you have to mix them every time you want to use them. Some artists keep records of 2 drops this and 4 drops that, but most painters are not detail people. Intuitives think differently—we do it the hard way and recreate.

Color Schemer also has a website where people upload their palettes so you can scan through tens of thousands of examples, and even rate them. They are all named: A Rose, A Walk in the Park, Angel in the Moonlight. Even Baby Poop and Windows XP. Wedding names are common and get a lot of stars: Winter Wedding, My Wedding, Silver Wedding, Tiffany’s Berry Wedding, Sunny Wedding Day. You get the idea.

I spend hours there, particularly instead of doing my taxes, like today when I’ve received my last deferral and have four days to finish them. I have a whole folder of palettes, my own and others. Totally useless. Complete waste of time. So I recommend Color Schemer if you care about color, or even if you don’t. You might grow to love it since you don’t even have to mix the paint.

Color Schemer Website
Warning for the color sensitive: The featured palettes start on this same page. You won’t be able to avoid seeing them.

Q. Your artist example let me come out another question – is teaching/learning modelling like teaching/learning arts (no orderly way to teach/learn, very depends on learner characteristic)?

A. To some extent, I think it is probably how modeling is taught. Some students need an intuitive sense of the whole before they can focus on details. Others need the details in order to understand the whole.

There are two ways that figure drawing has been taught, for example. One stresses gesture drawing, observation, feeling the figure you see in your body. You draw standing up with a freely moving arm or sit on a drawing bench with the drawing pad propped up in front of you so you can move freely. Poised for action.

The other way teaches rules about figures. Proportions like the length of the nose in relation to the ears, the size of the forearm in relation to the hand. First you learn these ideal measurements from a book, then you modify them based on the unique characteristics of your subject. The emphasis is on careful pencil drawings and using the pencil to measure the distance between the nose and the upper lip. This is often what you see in films where the artist is holding up a brush handle or a pencil like a ruler. This measurement is thought my some to be the most significant measurement to capture a likeness. Get that right and you can hardly go wrong.

The interesting thing for me is that I was taught that the first way, gesture and feeling, were the only honest way to draw. When I began teaching I discovered that some students can’t learn that way. They can’t understand the exercises, don’t know what to observe or to feel, and have no sense of using charcoal or paint freely. Or drawing standing up.

My students were doing independent study so I had two books that I assigned with exercises and projects — one based on gestural drawing and one based on classical drawing. If a student didn’t understand one, they loved the other.

The same is true of three dimensional drawing and painting and the flat two dimensional drawings usually referred to as primitive. I had two students from South America who were literally unable to draw three dimensionally. One insisted on trying and it took her 6 months to finish a 10 by 12 still life. She said it was the hardest thing she had ever done and she would never do it again.

Until I recognized these two styles of approaching drawing and seeing space, I thought some students were just unable to draw.

Modeling is probably the same way. The problem in specialized schools is that one kind of student is attracted to them so one style becomes the only one recognized. Chicken and egg, of course, but not completely. I was teaching in a liberal arts and sciences college for adults so my students had already developed career paths and many preferences based on experience. They were formed. After many years, I was able to predict how a student would approach drawing, even approach stepping into my office, based on their major study or work experience.

Specialized, highly selective schools attract certain personalities. No one in any art school or class I ever attended taught classical drawing. It was the academy of the 19th century, wiped out by the Impressionists. But the people who saw the world in classical terms were still out there, just not in art school.

That’s what i fear might be happening to systems thinking and system dynamics — one approach is emphasized to the exclusion of others.

Q. If I read your comment correctly, it seems to suggest that conventional subjects actually seldom try to assess their transfer of learning to students’ everyday life for longer period of time.

A. At the college level, the professors often consider this mundane. Their job is to raise standards and teach pure knowledge. If they need an example in business, for example, they go to a major corporation or Harvard Business School Case Studies, not to a local corporation where the students would get a lot of attention and more hands on learning.

In another example I learned of last week, an iT person told me she was trying to work with a college where they were using a technology that 90% of the world had stopped using years ago. They insisted on using it because it was pure and based on the original concepts of whatever. Only in a college would this logic be acceptable—that outdated technology was better because it was pure, based on essential principles someone had established a decade before. A decade in iT is a millennium anywhere else.

When I was a child, it never occurred to me that people wrote books. I never thought of where they came from even though I was an avid reader. They were all library books so I guess I thought they had always had existed. Now we have author tours and artists in the schools. My granddaughters think nothing of writing their own books (short and not always complete).

I argued this point repeatedly with a colleague in Manhattan who ran a semester in New York program for artists. The students had a studio (paid for by financial aid) and did internships with artists. He insisted on getting internships with “top” artists, which I would call “currently fashionable.” The problem was that these internships resulted in being the underling to the underling and spotting the artist across the warehouse-sized studio, maybe making contact once or twice a month. In order to afford such a studio an artist had to have a huge market, and then enough staff to produce it all. It was far above the level that a college graduate could hope to achieve—partly because they were in college and not painting.

One of my students who enrolled in the program insisted on doing an internship with a painter whose work she admired. The artist was actively showing and had a gallery on 57th Street but she wasn’t fashionable and didn’t have work in the major museum collections yet. But my student learned first-hand how to manage all the business aspects of being an artist and accompanied the artist to openings, parties, interviews with potential purchasers, and dinner with the artist’s dealer.

The artist was at a professional level much closer to my student’s so the learning could be applied immediately. My student also refused to move into the college’s studio space because she had a small studio at home and preferred to work with no distractions and all night if she felt like it without having to be out on the streets of the city at 3:00 in the morning. She brought her paintings to the college studio for critiques.

My colleague said my student wasn’t meeting the right people. Do you know what it means to have a recommendation from _____? Well, none of his students ever became famous and most didn’t have enough paintings done when they graduated to even think about asking for a recommendation to a dealer. They were too busy meeting people to learn how to find a studio they could afford when they graduated.

My student (not because she was mine but that’s the most convenient way to identify her) was able to use her practical connections to get a shared studio in a neighborhood of artists like herself and become an active self-supporting artist—as much as artists are ever self-supporting. She was still working as a waiter but in the 1980s almost every artist in NY was working as a waiter.

The important thing was that she had a studio in a community of artists, a host of connections at her level of development, and the skills and confidence to use them.

There have been many times in the last few years when I’ve wondered why so many of the rights women won in the 1970s are just taken for granted. At bottom, it’s gratifying that my daughter can take these rights for granted, but I’m afraid they will disappear if the feminists, the F-Women, and their work is forgotten.

I wish I didn’t have so many projects already so I could re-start the movement in order to finish the issues like child care and salaries that still linger inequitably, and also to remind women why the F-Women fought their silly battles like changing the laws so women could keep their own names. And the bra burning. Does anyone remember what we used to be expected to wear? Watch a Doris Day movie. Or a Joan Crawford.

I just had a discussion a month or so ago on a writer’s list about addressing women. It was deja vu all over again.

The woman was doing invitations for a charity event, which are supremely royal, and insisted on using titles for everyone, in the old style, Mr. and Mrs. Important Dude. Her problem was that some of the women who were “Dr” were married to men who were just “Mr.” What to do? She couldn’t call them Mr. and Dr. Important Dude.

Further, it is inappropriate to refer to a woman’s professional status in a social situation but these women had responded to invitations as “Dr.” Should she ignore their social gaff?

Of course it was not only proper for a man to be referred to with a professional title, it was a serious faux pas not to do so.

Is this sounding like the 19th century yet?

We got into a huge argument about why she was using titles at all. She thought I was being “reactionary” and “ignorant of proper social etiquette.” From the context my guess is that she was about 38, old enough to know better.

Hats off to Ellen. I hope she doesn’t stop writing.

Sharon.

Ellen Goodman is a syndicated columnist for the Boston Globe

(ellengoodman@me.com).

Read more: http://www.postgazette.com/pg/09359/1023431-109.stm#ixzz0b78A1JAh

In my junior year of high school my art teacher, Larry Hoffman, drew a caricature of me in my year book. I was dressed in the Helen of Troy costume I had worn to our Grand Beaux Arts Ball, a picnic by a brown lake, and painting a single perfect olive in the middle of a huge canvas. Seeing my blank expression, he said, “You are like an olive. People either like you or hate you, but your taste is distinctive and has no substitute.” All I understood was that I stood out, not what sixteen-year-olds want to do.

This “Reader on Becoming Educated Person” keeps rolling along. I probably won’t do a revision. Wadsworth’s College Success Series is still the imprint, but each royalty statement comes from a different publisher. I have not a clue if I even have an editor. The book sells on Amazon for $77+. No photographs. A few tables and graphs. No disk. No stickers even! It is a wonderful, wonderful book. It just shouldn’t cost $77 to parents are already in shock from paying tuition. The next book . . . stay tuned.

I’ve spent most of the last eight years studying and writing about sociocracy, a system of governance based on consensus decision-making. A seeming u-turn from the arts and fiction writing, but various organizations I’ve been involved with over the years were striving for a social order based on inclusiveness and equality. I believe that sociocracy is a method of organizing and governing such a society.