Colour

Colour can be described by three attributes. Hue is what makes red red, or green green, or yellow yellow. Tone is how light or dark a hue is. Temperature is how warm or cool a colour feels when set against another colour: a cool blue, for instance, against a warm orange. A single hue can be given in a nearly endless range of tones. Complementary colours are the pairs that contrast most strongly with each other; they sit opposite one another on a colour wheel, and placed side by side each makes the other look brighter. Red and green, blue and orange, and yellow and violet are such pairs. Tate links the nineteenth-century growth of scientific colour theory to impressionism, post-impressionism and fauvism; the impressionists were the first to notice that a shadow is not neutral but is tinted with the complement of the light falling on it, so yellow sunlight throws a violet shadow. A Japanese encyclopaedia starts the study of colour with Newton's 1666 finding that light is made of spectral colours, and says it advanced greatly only from the later nineteenth century. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, describes the pictures in its Lee Dae-won exhibition as built from overlapping lines, dots and planes of colour, with a light that does not float above the picture but is embedded and built up within its surface.

Find two strongly contrasting colours side by side, and see whether each looks brighter next to the other.