Customer Reviews

Color in Art (World of Art)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I thought this book was great. Of course, the best book on color is Josef Albers--Interaction of Color, but this is a worthy companion. Interesting to read how artist's perceptions and ideas of color have evolved over time. Good for artists, as well as non-artists, and will get you thinking about color in a new way. Recommend.

I gave this book two stars:both stars for the illustrations and no stars for the text. The illustrations look great but as I was reading the book, I was surprised to see that it had been published in 2006. It seemed not to have benefitted from any word processing. I felt I was trying to read a bunch of notes on index cards, quickly stapled together into chapters. There was no effort to explain what the whole book was trying to do, how the chapters were organized and what might happen in each chapter. I was constantly stymied by a thread of an idea that would fray into nothing, by a jump into a new subject, by repetitions, by hops backwards and forwards in history, by an inconsistent approach to the relationship between the science of light and philosophical conjectures about color theory. The text is a mess.
This is a shame because scattered throughout the book are fascinating little anecdotes that would be hard to find anywhere else. Would it ever be possible for an editor to take John Gage's index cards and rewrite this book? I know that I would read it if someone took a crack at it.

I have a little bit of background on colour theory, so I read this book expecting to learn much of colour in art. It is evident that the author has done much research in this area and has plenty of things to say. However, I felt that the book was badly written. Many sentences could have been broken down into two or more, because they contained several ideas, which were difficult to absorb. E.g., The author writes about an artist, who tried to show something in his art works, while mentioning his educational background and teacher and similar artists in one sentence! Despite re-reading several paragraphs several times, I had difficulty understanding what the author was trying to say. Perhaps the book is more suited for people, who already have knowledge on many of the artists, but not for newbies to art like me. The book should be re-written until the message of each chapter is more clear!