Understanding the Munsell Color System

As an oil painter in the realist figurative tradition, I place a premium on mixing and applying colors in the correct balance and gradations. The Munsell color system offers conceptual and practical support in these endeavors. Massachusetts Normal Art School instructor Albert Munsell developed the system in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In defining a three-dimensional model of colors, the system formulates a precise way of understanding color based on its main components: value, chroma, and hue. By extension, the system offers vital insights into color combinations, color balance, and complementary colors. As defined in the Munsell Book of Color, complementary colors are actually opposite hues. The Munsell system arranges hues in a circular horizontal plane. Drawing a straight line through any two points in the circle, running through a neutral central pole, defines which two hues are complementary. These two colors provide the strongest possible contrast to each other, yet when mixed, they create an almost neutral gray.

The artist can also draw a line between any two hues on the circle without passing through the central axis. Drawing a line out to the circle at a 90-degree angle from the center point provides the hue derived from mixing these 2 hues. Hue is just one component of overall color, and the three dimensionality of the Munsell system allows additional elements of color to be defined. Chroma, or purity of color, is measured radially from the central neutral pole within the circular horizontal plane and within hue-specific bands.

Thus, each segment of chroma moving outward represents an increased purity of color within a particular hue. Interestingly, due to what is visible to the human eye, some colors have a larger number of potential chroma than others. For example, light yellows have a significantly larger number of possible chroma than light purples. The third element of color is value, which is measured along the central neutral pole. The positioning of the horizontal hue-and-chroma elements along this vertical value axis defines colors’ lightness and darkness.

The Munsell color system illustrates that some hues have a greater effect than others. Red is an example. For this reason, an artist seeking ideal contrast and color balance might try matching a weak chroma of this hue with a strong chroma of its opposite hue. Ideally, any color system constitutes a starting point from which to gain a fuller understanding of color in painting and to develop analytical habits of balancing and matching colors. With complicated color schemes, even the strongest adherent to the Munsell color system will find it advantageous to throw a good deal of intuition and inspiration into the mix.

About the Author: An Austin, Texas-based fine artist working largely on commission, Graydon Parrish specializes in life-size narrative and allegorical paintings, as well as portraits and flower paintings. He is currently developing exercises that bring modern color theory, and its concomitant divisions, to contemporary figurative art.

A Renewed Interest in Classical Art and Contemporary Classicism

As a contemporary artist utilizing classical styles, I am very interested in the emergence of what has been termed “contemporary classicism.” This term encompasses figurative painters who engage fully with modern social issues on allegorical and narrative levels. As a student at Amherst College engaged in independent studies in the 1990s, I utilized many of the hallmarks of classicism embodied in paintings by such artists as Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and Michelangelo, turning them to allegorical use. In 1999, my painting Remorse, Despondence, and Acceptance of an Early Death, which comments on the AIDS epidemic, was purchased by the Amherst College Board of Trustees for display in the Mead Art Museum. 

Realism is alive and well in a contemporary setting and has been for some time. Numerous art schools, including the Grand Central Academy of Art in New York, at which I am an instructor, and the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, direct students toward portraying the human form naturalistically and with integrity. Classical artists from Caravaggio to Rubens are used as benchmarks for depictions of the human form in representational art. At the same time, critical reassessment continues to bolster the standing of classical artists who had strong reputations during their lifetimes but whose work was submerged in the tides of impressionism, modernism, and postmodernism. An example is Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a key classical artist of the Victorian era whose scenes often involved reconstruction of the ancient Roman milieu. The value of his art plummeted from the 1920s to the 1960s, with his work denounced by prominent critics and artists. The past 20 years have witnessed a dramatic turnaround in the market for Tadema’s artwork, culminating in sales at auction of The Finding of Moses in late 2010 for over $35 million and The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra: 41 BC in early 2011 for over $29 million. This caught many in the art establishment off guard: Alma-Tadema’s works were only expected to sell for between $3 million and $5 million.

I, too, have benefited from this renewed interest in figurative art, as exemplified by the Stuckist movement, which has grown into an international phenomenon over the past decade. In 2002, the New Britain Museum of American Art commissioned me to paint The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy: September 11, 2001, which took four years to complete. In creating the large-scale painting, I combined figuration, contrast, and hues typical of classical academy artists, with allegorical intent that drew on the issues of our era. 

About the Author: Austin, Texas-based painter Graydon Parrish instructs at the Grand Central Academy of Art in New York, with a focus on practical applications of the Munsell color theory.

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