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Choosing the right color composition for a particular work of art or a painting is often the most important step in creating a harmonious masterpiece. Just as in music, where notes have particular tones, we say that different colors and pigments have different tones, but that we can perceive. Here, it is the eye rather than the ear which is distinguishing the tone.

We can think of the artist’s palette with the different paint colors arranged about as a musical instrument. By squeezing the paint from the tube onto the palette the painter sets up a sequence of fundamental color or “notes”, which can employed in the visual composition of the art piece. The notes are color tones, and the way in which they are utilized within the space of the painting creates rhythms on the canvas. Movement can be generated, and emotions evoked. Mixing the colors is like playing chords, evoking complex harmonies that dance within the eye from mind of the painter. In this way, the creative expression of the artist speaks to the audience directly. The viewer of the painting should be sensitive to the spectral harmonies and other color medleys employed in its creation.

In composing a piece, different colors might be chosen for different effects, such as to evoke certain emotions, to give rise to different reactions or to harmonize or even jar the perspective of the viewer. In contemporary abstract works, we (the painters) will often utilize non-realistic colors for these purposes. For instance, red might cause a reaction of excitement and passion, dark navy blue might be used to symbolize constancy and dependability, and so on. Even if a mountain can never be red (with the exception of a wash of sunset colors), and artist just might choose it to be so. In realistic paintings such as landscapes, the painter will try to stay as close as possible to the “objective” colors of the scene. Light, its qualities and its effects on our perception of color are obviously crucially important in this process.

The study of the effects of color, its symbolism and its practical use specifically in painting, and more generally in the visual arts is known as color theory. This makes use of terms such as saturation, hue, lightness, iridescence and transparency to describe various different attributes of colors and the way they are used by the artist in practice.