Description
While this volume explores the nature of color, it could just as well have been titled the Color of Nature. Author Kimberly Collins German is a landscape painter, teacher, and architectural color designer who finds color to be a basic element in how one senses the environment. She acknowledges that color vision varies with sex, age, time of day, mood, and lighting, and that it can be difficult to capture the true colors that the viewer appears to see. For this effort, she urges the painter to venture into nature and to capture the spectral sensations that are first perceived in the natural surroundings. Exercises are offered to enhance the painters’ skill in capturing the truest nuance of light on the natural scenery, and explorative techniques used by past artists are recorded. Unfortunately, the painting exercises were not included in this review issue. This is a book that will appeal to plein air painters and designers concerned with the effect color adds to one’s surroundings. Though the text shows much enthusiasm for the value of color in natural settings, there is much repetition on the same theme.