I think a lot of things that we think about consciously when we’re looking at paintings become unconscious (hopefully) when we’re actually in the act of painting. I recall playing lots of music and just thinking of the feeling of flying. I don’t recall thinking consciously about all these things at the time. “It’s interesting for me to read such a post-mortem. Here’s what Gurney said about McDaniels analysis. McDaniel is trying to learn from other artists by analyzing what works. Instead of referring to the traditional hue harmonies (monochromatic, analagous, complementary, etc) he uses Gurney’s gamut system to analyze the color scheme. He presents a very detailed analysis that includes sections on the colors, the values and the saturations, as well as composition. McDaniel’s recent post features one of Gurney’s paintings, “Flights of Fancy” shown above. Yesterday when I checked his site Gurney had a link to Scott McDaniel’s blog, Ideas Made of Light. McDaniel calls himself “. someone who is looking at what other artists have done so I can figure out how to produce the images in my head.”

Gurney’s book, Color and Light, includes many of his posts on color and is a must read for anyone interested in color phenomenon. I am constantly trying to figure out more about how color works. His gamuts are sections of this wheel. The interactive Gamut Mask developed by Richard Robinson is a fun way to play with this idea. Gurney has his own version of a CMYRGB color wheel that he calls a YURMBY wheel. Some of my favorite posts in his blog are the series about gamuts and color masking. Since then I’ve faithfully checked into his blog, Gurney’s Journey, at least once a week. It wasn’t until a few years later that Lindly Haunani asked if I knew about his posts on color. I first came across the work of James Gurney when my daughter was into dinosaurs and we read the Dinotopia books together.

James gurney color theory