The eye-catchy colours and lines of Paul Klee (2)

As promised here is another piece inspired by that clever colourist whose Tate Modern, London, retrospective ‘Making Visible’ I visited last year (it runs till 9th March 2014).

I love Paul Klee’s explorative understanding of colour and on seeing Greeting and Separation in the Evening (above) I just thought “wouldn’t these translate into a lovely chest of drawers?” 

Greetings from Berlin

These quite tiny watercolour studies (both done in 1922 and for his students) explore how complementary colours work together (Klee was a great teacher at the Bauhaus).

I was really struck by Greeting (above) in which Klee paints shutter-like bands of gradated colour across a page while differently coloured arrows flow up and down to meet (and greet?). As an exercise in using complementary colours, what I found interesting was the way in which he starts with orange at the bottom and ends with gluey-grey at the top. In between there is no colour, just white. 

I tried the same approach in my studio using Barcelona Orange and Greek Blue from the Chalk Paint® range. I mixed the two complementary colours together, creating a similar effect to Klee's painting but with a dark greyish colour in the centre drawer. I was fortunate to find a chest which has no gaps in the drawers, which really helped create the effect of stripes of colour.

Get it on your Chest

1. I started on the bottom drawer with Chalk Paint® in Greek Blue, and then I mixed some Barcelona Orange until I thought “that’s a nice colour” and painted it on.

2. On the next shelf up I added a little bit more Barcelona Orange, mixed it in again until I thought “yes, that’s another nice colour’.

3. I continued upwards, drawer by drawer, each time adding a bit more Barcelona Orange to make quite gradual colour gradations (on drawers 1-4).

4. I then made a big jump to drawers 5 and 6 as I wanted to end up with pure Barcelona Orange.

I really like the overall effect, even if the gradations are a bit “jumpy” at the top. Actually that might be its charm because it is not so studied or predictably “colour coded”. (Otherwise, I would have needed a massively tall piece of furniture!). And all I needed was just two pots of paint!

The modernist furniture piece was a great canvas to work on too: I painted a graphite line around it and the little brass handles are a lovely touch – a bit like a 1950’s military coat (think Sgt. Pepper's). The overall effect is very pleasing and you see the magic of complementary colours at work!

Hope you think so too.

Yours, Annie

The eye-catchy colours of Paul Klee (1)

What can I say about avant garde artist Paul Klee except he really knocks my socks off! I’d forgotten how much he has influenced me until a recent visit to the Making Visible Exhibition at Tate Modern (on London’s South Bank).

Katie Harrison (‘honorary daughter’) made me go with her boyfriend Hugo Manual (my youngest son aka Chad Valley) because as a creative herself she’s very keen on the idea that you need to ‘feed yourself’ as an artist; and she’s absolutely right!  But I need to be told this as otherwise I just keep my head down and work. So seeing the Klee show spurred to me to produce new pieces AND to think about the nature of colour.

What’s the key to Klee?

To my mind Klee (1879-1940) was a great colourist and colour has always made a huge impact on me. 

He was a very measured artist, very very thorough – though when you first see his work you think he is (oddly) lyrical and light, and quite slight. In fact when he gets into something he’ll do it again and again and again really understanding it.  He’s actually quite a mathematical artist, which I really appreciate as I love the mix of art and science. Klee was exploring a whole system: take a look below at Fish Magic (1925, 77 x 98.3 cm oil and watercolour on canvas).

It’s his exploration of colour using squares and rectangles on other background colours that knocks me out as below with Lowlands (1932, 30 x 48 cm, watercolour on paper) ...

Learning from a master of colour

The watercolour that impacted the most for me was Polyphony (1932, 66.5 x 106 cm) and on seeing it I knew I had to get home and work something up from this. In this work, he creates layers and layers of colour using a pattern of squares overlaid with different coloured dots.

It’s all about how colours are affected by the colours underneath them… how colour works and I’m tremendously interested in that. This piece made me think I want to do something like that, so I went to work when I got back to the studio.

Klee-coloured chest of drawers

The first thing I did was find a fairly modern chest of drawers that I could work with.
1. I painted the whole thing using Chalk Paint® in Paris Grey first for a good neutral background. 
2. I then ripped off various flaps from cardboard boxes and painted onto them. I used a limited number of colours from the Chalk Paint® range to keep the effect similar in tone (but not so similar that you couldn’t differentiate i.e. nothing very contrasty).
3. Next I printed (i.e. pressed) the cardboard squares onto the cabinet which gave a slightly uneven effect. The flaps of the cardboard boxes were a good size to cover fairly large areas (if the cardboard bits are too small it gets boring trying to cover a large area – so be bold use big!). 
4. Then when that was all printed (and using the same colours) I roughly applied paint onto some bubble wrap. 
5. Finally I pressed the ‘tips’ of the bubble wrap onto the surface of the chest of drawers to create the dot effects.

Be bold, be experimental

So basically you have two layers and yes it’s very messy, your hands are covered with paint and there are bits of used-up plastic and cardboards all over. 

I want to do more because now I’ve finished it I realise it was like a rough first draft and that’s fine because it’s interesting and unique and I am very pleased with it. But having done one experiment I can see other ways of doing it – just as Klee would have seen it – you don’t have to be perfect and precise and that’s what makes it so beautiful. So I’m going to try another one, perhaps this time with a more neutral finish all in greys, beiges and white. Watch out for more Paul Klee-inspired pieces!

Yours, Annie