The First Response: Airplane Overhead — Jessica

Color is a great call. Even though I’m in a black and white mood currently (because of the other things that I’m trying to concentrate on), I know that color is something that I should study.

Everything boils down to line, form and color, right? I feel like I’ve got a good handle on the line and the light aspects of photography but color, for me, tends to introduce too much chaos. I haven’t learned how to bring a cosmos out of the chaos of color around me. That’s why I have chosen to use this call to focus on simplifying color in my pictures.

On Saturday, my husband bought a remote-controlled plane — “for the children,” he said. Yesterday we took it to a big field and flew it until it crashed too hard into a tree branch and cracked the wing. I got some great photos, but this one, with the gradient of blue sky and the touch of green tree top, seemed to me, to be the strongest color statement.

And finally, I’ve picked up “The Art Spirit” again and I wonder why I ever left off. But here a few quotes from his section on color (the book is aimed toward painters, but works for all visual arts, I think):

There is a super color which envelops all the colors. It is this super color — this color of the whole, which is more important.

Do not be interested in light for light’s sake or in color for color’s sake, but in each as a medium of expression.