Exploring Color Interactions Illuminated in Goldwork Embroidery

This summer I was extremely excited to be awarded a Faculty Research and Professional Development grant through the NC State University College of Design (where I teach) to help fund my research project "Exploring Color Interactions Illuminated in Goldwork Embroidery”.  As I have written about on my blog before, I am very interested in how colors interact when you start mixing them with the gold and silver threads and wires in metal embroidery.  I began playing around with this after completing a color wheel with Tracy Franklin for my City & Guilds Goldwork Certificate I took with her.  I think I have lost count how many color wheels I have had to do throughout my design education and it was actually a really, really useful exercise and one that honestly I don't think I would have done on my own, atleast at that time.

 

Over the last 7 years, I have viewed numerous exhibitions and collections at different museums and churches to further my exploration and understanding of metal embroidery.  I began noticing that many of the colors that you see used with the metals are very similar to the colors seen in illuminated manuscripts--- very saturated primary colors and some secondary colors. 

What I find interesting is the somewhat unexpected quality of color when used with the gold embroidery.  Purples quickly turn to black on the darker side and start to read as gold when too light.  In traditional color theory, we are taught that yellow is purple's complement but gold does not equal yellow when inserted into the color wheel, even though that is what we traditionally do.

A few exhibitions that have greatly influenced the development of this project are Making Colour that was at the National Gallery in London during the summer of 2014 and Cézanne and the Modern at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta during the fall of 2015.    

Making Colour presented each hue in a different room describing in detail the development of the different pigments in paintings.  The most exciting aspects to me were 2 parts: 
1- The microscopic cross sections used to identify the pigments made me begin to wonder what if instead of matching that blue I wanted in my embroidery I created the perception of that blue.  Why couldn't I treat my stitches like the molecules in the cross sections? 
2- Gold and silver were presented in their own room at the "end of the rainbow" of hue rooms.  There is also a great curator talk on YouTube that addresses the reasoning behind this.  So what if gold and silver were not part of the color wheel but a separate group of their own? 

Cézanne and the Modern was beyond amazing.  It was my first experience seeing Soutine and Sisley paintings in person, and they allowed viewers to take photos!!!!  (Massive thank you to the High Museum of Art and the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection!).  Zooming in with my camera and isolating different areas of paints allowed me to see the similarities in the color interactions seen in the Impressionists, Post Impressionist and Early Modern painters and embroidery.  They utilized color in a more deconstructed way, creating the perception they wanted by using certain colors adjacent to each other instead of blending matched colors and layering transparent layers.  Additionally, their focus on quick and expressive brushstrokes creates similar texture, shadows and directional movement seen in stitching. 

In this project (it is a seed grant so project in very beginning phase), I want to look at Josef Albers and Bauhaus color theory and the color interactions in Impressionist, Post Impressionist and Early Modern painters.  These uses and theories on color interactions will then inform a set of written articles and a set of embroidery samples investigating the application of these theories in embroidery. I will complement this with research on specific embroidery precedence-- the split stitching in Opus Anglicanum, Constance Howard, Beryl Dean, Audrey Walker, Alice Kettle, and Margaret Nicholson to begin. 

So some of the main questions I am going to be exploring (and I know all of these are huge questions but again this is a seed - in the beginning- grant) are:
- what is the complement of gold?
- how does the texture and stitch pattern effect color perceptions in embroidery? (this question includes material selection i.e. wool v. silk, etc.)
- what can we learn from the Impressionists, Post Impressionists and Early Modern painters use of color theory?
- how can the luminocity seen in the Impressionists, Post Impressionists and Early Modern painters work be translated to stitching?

For the first research trip of the grant, I went to France to focus on the painting color observation part of the project.  I visited Auvers-sur-Oise (where Van Gogh spent the last couple months of his life and painted over 80 paintings), Monet's Gardens and House in Giverny, Musée d'Orsay, Musée de l'Orangerie, Musée Marmottan Monet, the Louvre, Notre Dame, and the Musée de Cluny (the last 2 were to see examples of ecclesiastical embroidery).  I thought over the next couple weeks I would write a bit about each place and share with you some of the things that I had seen and some of the ideas it is sparking in me to push my embroidery research.  Honestly, I will need a while to really process all of what I have seen the last week.  It has been amazing and I cannot wait to start stitching!