Chromophobia

"All painting involves the smearing of coloured paste over a flat surface, and it is done in order to trick and deceive the viewer,  a viewer who wants to be tricked and deceived into seeing something that is not there. and behind the make - up which is painting, there is nothing. There is no substance beneath the surface, no depth behind the appearance."

Chromophobia is a long meditation on color in western culture. Batchelor claims that color doesn't fit in with any of our social constructs. It's too immoral, unnamable, seductive, foreign, elusive. 

I think this is an interesting read as you think of form instead of colour when viewing an art work, an artwork should be simple - it should be plain, but that is not the case in many works of mine. I see my practice about form and colour and how colour creates a depth, a way to change a persons perspective is through colour, it creates depth and dimension. I use colour as a drawing tool and it is through this materiality and pigment that creates my works, it creates a fluid structure, something pen or pencil could not do with out the artists hand at present. 

The Barthes quotes, as one might expect, are delightful: "Color ... is a kind of bliss (jouissance) ... like a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell" and "if I were a painter, I should paint only colors: this field seems to me freed of both the Law ... and Nature (for after all don't the colors of nature come from the painters?)"  

 

"Colours, nicely modulated, give the eye pleasure, but that is purely sensory"  Sensation and pleasure in a painting to me makes the image complete, if it is aesthetically pleasing it will keep both the viewer and painter active in looking and creating.