Today I give you artworks that feature the Thanksgiving-ish color orange. My intention was to post a few, but once I started to collect a few, I saw orange in artworks everywhere! As this post grew, my shifting goals for organization and style became increasingly more difficult to manage, so pictures and text are not in any particular order of history. Factual orange seeds are interspersed, and perhaps are fruitful as an aid for rerouting more frighteningly primary issues such as red white and blue on this day.
If you have an orange painting that you’d like to share, I hope you will post it to our Facebook page. I’d love to see. Thank you, and enjoy!
Illuminated Gospel, Amhara peoples, Ethiopia, late 14th–early 15th century, parchment (vellum), wood (acacia), tempera and ink, 41.9 x 28.6 x 10.2 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Thangka Buddha
Bonampak
Orange and the ancient world
Ancient Egyptian artists used an orange mineral pigment called realgar for tomb paintings. This soft, sectile mineral occurs in monoclinic crystals, which can form into large clusters of scarlet, semi-precious gemstones. The same pigment was later used for coloring manuscripts by medieval artists.
Orange pigments were also made in ancient times from a mineral known as orpiment, whose naturally golden-yellow hue made it of great interest to alchemists; they conjectured it held the secret to forming gold. Orpiment was traded in the Roman Empire and was used as medicine in China despite its high arsenic content.
For centuries, orpiment was ground down and used as pigment in painting and sealing wax. In fact, it was one of the few clear, bright pigments available to artists until the 19th century, whose dawn saw the introduction of cadmium yellows, chromium yellows and organic dye-based colors. After the 19th century, orpiment became redundant because of its extreme toxicity and incompatibility with other common pigments, such as verdigris and azurite. (Source: artsandcollections)
Etymology
Before the 15th century, the color orange did not have a name in Europe; it was simply called yellow-red. Portuguese merchants brought the first orange trees to Europe from Asia in the late 15th and early 16th century, along with the Sanskrit, naranga—which became ‘naranja’ in Spanish and ‘laranja’ in Portuguese.
In English, the word ‘orange’ stems from the Old French and Anglo-Saxon orenge. The earliest recorded use of the word in English is from the 13th century and alludes to the fruit. In reference to the color, however, its earliest attested use is from the 16th century. (Source: Artsandcollections)
Thomas Schütte
Thomas Schütte
Edouard Vuillard woodcut print
Alex Katz woodcut print
Leonard Morane
Nam June Paik
Robert Rauschenberg lithograph
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
Let’s go for a moment to New York in the early 1950s. Frank O’Hara wrote about visiting the studio of his friend, the painter Michael Goldberg, and about how their processes differed, in the poem Why I am not a Painter. In the poem, Goldberg inserts the word ‘Sardines’ into his painting, then excises it; the finished painting is called Sardines. O’Hara, meanwhile, writes:
One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.
In the poem O’Hara keeps writing until a suite of poems titled Oranges emerges, with no mention of the color itself. Instead his friend, the painter Grace Hartigan made 12 paintings illustrating O’Hara’s Orangesand incorporating its text, in which the color allows her to explore questions of her own identity: as in O’Hara’s poem, here orange in the abstract becomes an open window into the self and how our actions relate to our identity. (Souce: Anothermag)
Grace Hartigan made 12 paintings illustrating O’Hara’s Oranges
Ellsworth Kelly
Helen Frankenthaler
Ann Hamilton
Jaq Chartier
Jennifer Marshall Monoprint
Matt Gonzalez
Richard Diebenkorn
Rothko
Christo and Jeanne Claude “The Gates”
Moldy Oranges
Kathleen Ryan’s Moldy Fruit Sculptures
18th and 19th century
In 1797, French scientist Louis Vauquelin discovered the mineral crocoite, which led in 1809 to the advent of the synthetic pigment chrome orange. Other synthetic pigments, cobalt red, cobalt yellow and cobalt orange, made from cadmium sulphide plus cadmium selenite, soon followed. These new pigments, plus the invention of the metal paint tube in 1841, meant artists could paint outdoors and capture the colors of natural light.
Pomona (pictured above in a painting by Nicolas Fouché c.1700), the goddess of fruitful abundance, was often depicted in orange; her name derived from the Latin word pomon, meaning fruit. Thanks to the 17th century invention of the heated greenhouse, oranges themselves became more common in northern Europe.
Much of 20th-century painting’s development relied on synthetic paint colors invented during the previous century. After the color theory work of English chemist George Field, who developed vivid synthetic pigments, painters including the Pre-Raphaelites were able to embrace orange in their work for the first time. Below: Frederic Leighton’s portrait Flaming June, in which a young woman in an apricot gown is asleep under an oleander plant. (Souce: Anothermag)
Flaming June, Frederic Leighton
In England orange became very popular with the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848. The flowing red-orange hair of Elizabeth Siddal, the wife of painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, became a symbol of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Albert Joseph Moore painted festive scenes of Romans wearing bright orange cloaks brighter than any Roman would have worn.
Albert Joseph Moore “Midsummer”
Orange became an important color for all the impressionist painters. Having studied recent books on color theory, they knew orange placed next to azure blue made both colors appear much brighter. Auguste Renoir painted boats with stripes of chrome orange straight from the paint tube.
Renoir
The post-impressionists went further with orange. Paul Gauguin used orange as backgrounds, for clothing and skin color, to fill his paintings with light and exoticism.
Gauguin
Gauguin
But Vincent Van Gogh was perhaps the most prolific user of the color. Orange and yellow represented for Van Gogh the pure sunlight of Provence. He created his own oranges with mixtures of yellow, ochre and red. He put an orange moon and stars in a cobalt sky.
Still Lives, with Orange
Van Gogh
Manet
Paul Gauguin
Alex Katz
Jim Phalen
Carmen Gillis
Ada Sadler
Orange Katz
Alex Katz
Alex Katz
Alex Katz
Alex Katz
Orange Egon
Egon Schiele
Egon Schiele
Egon Schiele
Scribbles, Lines, & Patterns
Van Gogh
Harmony Korine
Kungka Kutjarra
Kungka Kutjarra
Cy Twombly
Tom Lieber
Tom Lieber
Rosie Ngwarraye Ross
Paul Cristina
Philip Buller
Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown
Sherie Franssen
Sherie Franssen
Barbara Vaughn
Trees and Buildings
Kazuyuki Ohtsu
Kazuyuki Ohtsu
Lawren Harris
Lawren Harris
Tom Thomson
Georges Braque
Tom Thomson
Monet
John Frederick Kensett
Saffron Ladies
Edward Hopper
Alex Kannevsky
Ann Gale
Emil Robinson
Emil Robinson
Arthur Fontaine
The Forest
Anselm Kiefer
Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt
Stories in Orange
Feodor Yousov
Paul Klee
Paul Klee
Paul Klee
Suhas Bhujbal
Abstractions
Paul Klee
William Scott
Robert Motherwell
Ellsworth Kelly
Alex Couwenberg
Again, I invite you to add to our orange album on our Facebook page. Thank you, and enjoy you day!
Sandy Skoglund
You’re reading a V. Note, written by Ruthie V, the director of the Seattle Artist League. The League is an art school for the busy nurse, tech geek, and mom with a long lost art degree. We offer engaging online classes in drawing and painting. Join us! Find your class:https://www.seattleartistleague.com/product-category/d-online-classes/
The Seattle Artist League is excited to announce the prizes for this year’s Portrait Awards. These artworks were chosen out of 151 entries, from 72 artists. Media was mostly paintings and drawings, with a few mixed media and prints. All were completed within 2021 or early 2022. “It was an honour and a delight to see such …
What happens when paper is treated as a raw material, instead of a flat white rectangle? The photograph to the left is one that’s been circulating on the internet lately. This is what happens when wasps are given colored construction paper. The paper is used as fibers and pulp, not ready for pencil lines to represent an …
Art 21 by Michael Neault | Jan 7, 2013 Ilya Repin, “Unexpected Visitors” (or “They Did Not Expect Him”), 1884-1888. Oil on canvas. 63.19 x 65.95 in. The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. When you approach a painting in a gallery, it feels like you’re looking at the entire piece all at once, but what your …
One year ago in March, to protect our students and teachers from a new coronavirus, the Seattle Artist League moved our classes online. The virus was declared a national emergency, and we went into quarantine. We have now been in quarantine for thirteen months. Through this year, we have met each other online to draw, …
100 Orange Artworks
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Today I give you artworks that feature the Thanksgiving-ish color orange. My intention was to post a few, but once I started to collect a few, I saw orange in artworks everywhere! As this post grew, my shifting goals for organization and style became increasingly more difficult to manage, so pictures and text are not in any particular order of history. Factual orange seeds are interspersed, and perhaps are fruitful as an aid for rerouting more frighteningly primary issues such as red white and blue on this day.
If you have an orange painting that you’d like to share, I hope you will post it to our Facebook page. I’d love to see. Thank you, and enjoy!
Orange and the ancient world
Ancient Egyptian artists used an orange mineral pigment called realgar for tomb paintings. This soft, sectile mineral occurs in monoclinic crystals, which can form into large clusters of scarlet, semi-precious gemstones. The same pigment was later used for coloring manuscripts by medieval artists.
Orange pigments were also made in ancient times from a mineral known as orpiment, whose naturally golden-yellow hue made it of great interest to alchemists; they conjectured it held the secret to forming gold. Orpiment was traded in the Roman Empire and was used as medicine in China despite its high arsenic content.
For centuries, orpiment was ground down and used as pigment in painting and sealing wax. In fact, it was one of the few clear, bright pigments available to artists until the 19th century, whose dawn saw the introduction of cadmium yellows, chromium yellows and organic dye-based colors. After the 19th century, orpiment became redundant because of its extreme toxicity and incompatibility with other common pigments, such as verdigris and azurite. (Source: artsandcollections)
Etymology
Before the 15th century, the color orange did not have a name in Europe; it was simply called yellow-red. Portuguese merchants brought the first orange trees to Europe from Asia in the late 15th and early 16th century, along with the Sanskrit, naranga—which became ‘naranja’ in Spanish and ‘laranja’ in Portuguese.
In English, the word ‘orange’ stems from the Old French and Anglo-Saxon orenge. The earliest recorded use of the word in English is from the 13th century and alludes to the fruit. In reference to the color, however, its earliest attested use is from the 16th century. (Source: Artsandcollections)
Let’s go for a moment to New York in the early 1950s. Frank O’Hara wrote about visiting the studio of his friend, the painter Michael Goldberg, and about how their processes differed, in the poem Why I am not a Painter. In the poem, Goldberg inserts the word ‘Sardines’ into his painting, then excises it; the finished painting is called Sardines. O’Hara, meanwhile, writes:
One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life.
In the poem O’Hara keeps writing until a suite of poems titled Oranges emerges, with no mention of the color itself. Instead his friend, the painter Grace Hartigan made 12 paintings illustrating O’Hara’s Oranges and incorporating its text, in which the color allows her to explore questions of her own identity: as in O’Hara’s poem, here orange in the abstract becomes an open window into the self and how our actions relate to our identity. (Souce: Anothermag)
Moldy Oranges
18th and 19th century
In 1797, French scientist Louis Vauquelin discovered the mineral crocoite, which led in 1809 to the advent of the synthetic pigment chrome orange. Other synthetic pigments, cobalt red, cobalt yellow and cobalt orange, made from cadmium sulphide plus cadmium selenite, soon followed. These new pigments, plus the invention of the metal paint tube in 1841, meant artists could paint outdoors and capture the colors of natural light.
Pomona (pictured above in a painting by Nicolas Fouché c.1700), the goddess of fruitful abundance, was often depicted in orange; her name derived from the Latin word pomon, meaning fruit. Thanks to the 17th century invention of the heated greenhouse, oranges themselves became more common in northern Europe.
Much of 20th-century painting’s development relied on synthetic paint colors invented during the previous century. After the color theory work of English chemist George Field, who developed vivid synthetic pigments, painters including the Pre-Raphaelites were able to embrace orange in their work for the first time. Below: Frederic Leighton’s portrait Flaming June, in which a young woman in an apricot gown is asleep under an oleander plant. (Souce: Anothermag)
In England orange became very popular with the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848. The flowing red-orange hair of Elizabeth Siddal, the wife of painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, became a symbol of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Albert Joseph Moore painted festive scenes of Romans wearing bright orange cloaks brighter than any Roman would have worn.
Orange became an important color for all the impressionist painters. Having studied recent books on color theory, they knew orange placed next to azure blue made both colors appear much brighter. Auguste Renoir painted boats with stripes of chrome orange straight from the paint tube.
The post-impressionists went further with orange. Paul Gauguin used orange as backgrounds, for clothing and skin color, to fill his paintings with light and exoticism.
But Vincent Van Gogh was perhaps the most prolific user of the color. Orange and yellow represented for Van Gogh the pure sunlight of Provence. He created his own oranges with mixtures of yellow, ochre and red. He put an orange moon and stars in a cobalt sky.
Still Lives, with Orange
Orange Katz
Orange Egon
Scribbles, Lines, & Patterns
Trees and Buildings
Saffron Ladies
The Forest
Stories in Orange
Abstractions
Again, I invite you to add to our orange album on our Facebook page. Thank you, and enjoy you day!
You’re reading a V. Note, written by Ruthie V, the director of the Seattle Artist League. The League is an art school for the busy nurse, tech geek, and mom with a long lost art degree. We offer engaging online classes in drawing and painting. Join us! Find your class: https://www.seattleartistleague.com/product-category/d-online-classes/
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What happens when paper is treated as a raw material, instead of a flat white rectangle? The photograph to the left is one that’s been circulating on the internet lately. This is what happens when wasps are given colored construction paper. The paper is used as fibers and pulp, not ready for pencil lines to represent an …
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