Color Your World

Art

From food to fashion, color makes all the difference. Experts explain how the colors we see translate into how we feel

For those of us lucky enough to see it, color is, as French painter Fernand Léger once said, “a raw material indispensable to life”. It is what helps us cross the street, alerts us to danger, defines our appearance and alters our mood. While most of us use it countless times a day without even thinking, others think of nothing but. Top photo retoucher Pascal Dangin, for example, who spends countless hours making blue skies bluer, believes that “the most important part of color to communicate a brand or a product is really about the emotion it creates.” We asked him, and three other color-wielding creatives, what’s on the other side of the rainbow.

Leatrice Eiseman, Color Consultant at Pantone

Eiseman’s research creates color-trend forecasts for Pantone.

Andrew Kuo, painter

Audrey Louise-Reynolds, textile artist

Pascal Dangin, photo retoucher

Dangin worked on the 2004 Prada campaign.

LEATRICE EISEMAN – Color Consultant

Leatrice Eiseman’s job is to understand how color makes us feel about the products we buy and the environments we inhabit. One of her first clients in the early ’80s, when the world was still waking up to the potential value of color knowledge, was a maker of hospital food trays with a palette so noxious that business was sinking. “If you’re serving food to people who have balky appetites, you have to choose appetizing colors. It seemed so obvious,” Eiseman says. “That’s when it hit me that what seemed obvious to me wasn’t all that obvious to other people.”

These days (with a few minor exceptions like the computer brand that disregarded her advice to make a turquoise PC just before the iMac came along), Eiseman’s expertise is the holy grail for companies of all kinds, from consumer electronics to fashion to interior design. The biggest is Pantone. Over the past 12 years, Eiseman has helmed their New Jersey-based research arm and has helped to elect the Color of the Year (currently Marsala). She also puts together various Pantone color-trend forecasts, searching for prescience in future technologies, economic conditions, and cultural moments like the imminent convergence of Art Deco motifs in Downton Abbey and The Great Gatsby.

"In retail it’s location, location, location. In color it’s context, context, context. - Leatrice Eiseman"

In general, though, her work is less about zeitgeists than about small-scale revelations. “In retail it’s location, location, location. In color it’s context, context, context,” says Eiseman. For every job, she asks herself: “Does this color answer peoples’ needs? How does it stimulate their emotions? Is it appropriate for a given situation or place?” The answers to which, of course, are always less obvious than they seem.

ANDREW KUO – Painter

In one of Andrew Kuo’s recent chart paintings that distill topics from his daily life into variegated bar graphs and Venn diagrams, the artist found himself cataloging the deaths of four friends. “I tried not to use the color red, because I think it’s disrespectful,” says Kuo. (He also shies away from yellow in works about racism—too obvious.) But such touchy subjects are the exception rather than the rule, as the palettes of his paintings rarely correlate to their content. “Happiness isn’t yellow, and sadness isn’t blue,” says Kuo, as color’s role in his work isn’t to express meaning but to code complex systems of information, helping to differentiate between, say, the days of the week he likes and doesn’t like, or, for his upcoming solo show at Marlborough Chelsea this March, his various attempts to apply the theories of baseball statistician Bill James to wacky real-world scenarios.

"The more I think about color, and color theory, the more tightly wound I can become. - Andrew Kuo"

Even if his chromatic choices can seem arbitrary, the process behind them is anything but. In his Lower East Side studio, surrounded by 300 different paint tubes, Kuo routinely spends hours attempting to mix shades he’s never used before. Once he decides on the form and content of a given chart, he begins assigning those colors to its variables, working his way out from the middle as he makes judgments about which pinks might work alongside which purples. Sometimes he references his copious file of paint chips, which he culls from inspiration sources as diverse as Wolfgang Tillman’s photos, The New Yorker covers, The Simpsons and images he collects on the internet (he has a thing for cheesy sunsets). But at other times he lets his instincts take over. “The more I think about color, and color theory, the more tightly wound I can become,” he says.

AUDREY LOUISE REYNOLDS – Textile Artist

If every career has a tipping point, Audrey Louise Reynolds’s came at age 18 after working with chemical dyes at art school landed her in the emergency room. “I was sneezing colors,” says Reynolds. She immediately forswore the chemical stuff, and two years later began experimenting with organic ingredients, first as a textile designer and then as a part-time line cook bent on starting her own business. “I’d be playing in the kitchen at work, making reductions and adding citric acid to brighten them,” she says. “On my off time, I’d test the results on fabric.” If Reynolds has colors coming out her nose now, it’s only in the figurative sense. As a go-to for natural dyes, paints, and textiles, the Williamsburg­-based craftswoman has made everything from persimmon-tinted curtains for Esther de Rothschild to rainbow-striped cashmere sweaters for CFDA winners the Elder Statesmen.

"My workshop has everything you’d see in an artist’s studio and everything you’d see in a kitchen, combined. - Audrey Louise Reynolds"

Reynolds keeps binders full of the tens of thousands of color recipes she’s developed over the past 10 years, some of which companies purchase and others she uses in her own creative projects, like a pale-pink wedding dress she recently made for a client from $15,000 worth of crushed roses. Her dyes and paints are typically a blend of elements including Peruvian cochineal, Japanese indigo and all manner of flowers, vegetables and dirts harvested from her garden; the exact compositions depends on the client. “They’ll be trying to match a Kelly green, so I’ll say I can get you that through algae, onion skin, or grass,” she explains. “They’ll pick the ingredient they like best or that fits their budget.” After that, it’s up to much of the same alchemy Reynolds used in her restaurant days, tempting color out of plants or spices with heat, fermentation and baking soda. “My workshop has everything you’d see in an artist’s studio and everything you’d see in a kitchen, combined,” she laughs.

In an increasingly competitive field, Reynolds has made a name for herself by harnessing nature in her processes as well as her materials: She’s used ocean waves to push dye across swaths of fabric, and let falling snow drip colors through a screen and onto her textiles below. She also found an early niche in the kind of bright, crazy shades people don’t normally expect from someone of her ilk, but in an effort to become more of an authority in her field, she’s recently been going back to basics, devoting all her time to mastering the perfect navy or the perfect carbon-black. “I want to be able to fill every niche,” she says. “I want to be synonymous with color.”

PASCAL DANGIN – Founder of Box Studios

Most people think of Pascal Dangin’s job as airbrushing away cellulite and the odd pimple, but what clients like photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Vogue actually hire the famed photo retoucher for is his visual intuition. “When you do work like this for so many years, you tend to look at images no longer in their structural form, but in their color form,” says Dangin, who’s liable to spend hours laboring over the exact shade of a patch of sky or a model’s lips. To understand the way he perceives things, the Box Studios founder suggests a simple exercise: Look at a cement wall. Where you see a rough, grey surface, he’ll instantly notice the subtle blue cast of daylight, or the yellow tint thrown from a candle in the room. Similarly, a piece of white paper never really appears white to him. “It can drive you a bit crazy,” says Dangin.

"When you do work like this for so many years, you tend to look at images no longer in their structural form, but in their color form. - Pascal Dangin"

And yet because the hue, luminosity, tone and contrast of a photograph have an absolutely critical effect on how it impacts viewers, it is also his key source of creative inspiration. In one sense, it tells him what’s real, like the way a signature green Starbucks label will actually look more blue if shot at an outdoor café (which irks him to no end), or the way to calibrate the colors of a photograph to the shade he can recall most vividly from life, a trick diCorcia taught him years ago. But in another sense, it makes him value even more what’s not real, because of how subjective his work is and how attuned he is to the emotional pull of images. Dangin is a tireless champion of film, whose inherent color palettes imparted a unique character to photographs that now translates into a kind of warm nostalgia (hence the popularity of Instagram). “Your parents’ pictures, their 8mm film, these strange views or strange colors subconsciously make you feel good, because it reminds you of childhood,” he says.

Personally, Dangin’s most attracted to the first iteration of color film, Kodak’s Technicolor series, because it “kept the essentials of what an image and story could be,” he says. He also loves the colors of the ’70s, when he grew up, and those of photographers like Harry Callahan, Joel Sternfeld, and William Eggleston. He’s even gone so far as to write software that imparts his preferred palette to images. And yet ultimately, when Dangin is submerged in the darkness of his underground editing room, it’s his client’s needs that come first—enhancing their vision to create the most arresting image possible.

Pantone factory, Andrew Kuo and Audrey Louise-Reynolds photos by Mike Vorrasi.