Color in Painting
Composition and Meaning
What color does in a picture beyond describing things
A painter can use color to build depth, set a mood or send a message. Some of these effects rest on how the eye works; others rest on habits a culture teaches. Four paintings, from a seventeenth-century landscape to a modern image of anxiety, show each one at work.
- Haze, value and hue as cues to distance
- Color taken from life versus color invented
- Palettes chosen to steer a viewer's feelings
- Colors that stand for ideas, and who can read them
Works in this part
Image: Art Institute of Chicago Open Access · CC0