Another work that recently came back into my possession is this life drawing on red paper (1987), I was 30, and it was the same year I completed one of my most important works, Denouement (image lower in the post).
I didn’t so much have a color theory as I had an observational approach. Later I developed the Newberry Color Theory, but that came after decades of observing perceptual effects of color and how they work as artist tools in creating form, light, and space. For me as an artist, color was never anything in and of itself. For example, simple colors don’t have any meaning to me whatsoever, like the color blue. My interest in color is how it works with form, light, and space.
If I unpack the drawing on the red paper, it’s a fascinating problem because, actually, instead of making up any of the colors, I was drawing the color vibrations that I saw, going from the general to the specific with more time. The figure drawing was a three h…