Colour Study:

A brief introduction to the beginning stages of the Hensche approach to colour study (pdf).

Written, compiled and edited by George T.  Thurmond.

From the Introduction:

I was invited to join the rationalpainting.org Hensche discussion by someone who thought the information on Hensche was being given from second, third or fourth hand sources mostly as negative opinion and that no reasonable information of his exacting ideas had been posted.  In looking over those postings one could say that that was mostly true. I am no authority on all things Hensche but had an association with him from the summer of 1969 until a few months before his death in 1992, as student, comrade, and friend. And although having been a student of colour for over 40 years that certainly makes no claim to having a complete knowledge on the subject,  however I am willing to freely pass along some of my colour study experience and will try to be as accurate as possible in the reporting of my  limited understanding of it.  I will attempt in this article to make things clear enough for each of you to teach yourselves how to study colour, which is of course the best of all worlds, one in which you will make your own perceptual discoveries and neither be a mimic, clone, or derivative of anyone else’s vision.

Unlike so many today Hensche was not consumed with blind ambition to make a name for himself but put his efforts into his continued perceptual development and his teaching of colour study.  I will say here at the beginning that Hensche did NOT teach colour as an adjunct to, or a decoration for academic drawing and values as it is being sold in many schools and workshops today.  He fought this bastardized hybridization his entire life and although he also fought the modernists tooth and nail he said, “The moderns have their own thing and they are welcomed to it.”… “It is the academics who refuse to allow any new ideas in that are contrary to their outdated obsolete formulas which always lead to the same predictable results.”  

The colour study approach is a visual comparative process and is deceptively simple on the surface, the major requirements of which are one’s mental, perceptual, and observational concentration, and that is the difficult part. I have laid out the study procedure as Hensche taught it and explained it not just to me but also to many others.  I have also tried to insert some brief historical context in order to give credit to where all these ideas evolved from. Hawthorne and Hensche did not pull them out of thin air but were part of an historical progression. As he used to say at the beginning of many lectures, “One has to know where one fits into the history of the ideas in painting.”

For those who wish to actually do the long term exercises and colour problems and learn how to study colour for themselves I think you will find these pages and extended sequential examples most useful. The words themselves mean very little and one will never have an understanding of it without doing a great many colour studies over a great many years.  As to what he taught Hensche  said "no one should believe anything I tell them, you should do the work and test it for yourselves, I could be wrong but none of  you can know that until you have studied it for yourself.”

To open the pdf. to the full article please click here.