Why I Love to Knit: Part 3

These days I’m improvising a little boy’s helmet cap using many of the small balls of yarn that have accumulated in my work basket from prior projects. It’s a pleasure to handle these familiar yarns that tie me back to sweaters and scarves I’ve made over the last several years. My thoughts inevitably lead, of course, to the folks I’ve knitted them for. This project also reveals to me a palette that especially pleases me -- various intensities of natural unbleached wool, assorted hues of blue, green, and yellow, an occasional touch of orange or ruby. Worked together, the colors pulsate, come to life in surprising and satisfying ways.

I am reminded of my exciting discovery last fall at The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam of van Gogh’s red lacquer Chinese tea box containing small balls of different colored yarns wound together by the artist to test the visual effects of what his friend Emile Bernard called “unexpected interlacing tonalities.”

According to Debora Silverman’s Van Gogh and Gaugin: The Search for Sacred Art. (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2000), “In studying the play of color tones with his colored yarn balls, van Gogh re-created the method used by Michel Chevreul, author of the most important books on color theory for 19th century painters. . . and director of the Gobelins Tapestry Works. . . . Van Gogh had read and absorbed Chevreul’s color theories while in Nuenen in 1884-1885, during the time that he studied the hand-loom weavers in his parents’ village and depicted them in 34 images of varying media. . . . THe months of daily observation of the weavers’ activities activated van Gogh’s interest in applying paint as threads and color as fibers, to be placed on the canvas [like] the warp and weft of woven cloth.”

In van Gogh’s April 30 1885 letter to his brother Theo, this fibre-art color theory has already taken form: “When the weavers weave those fabrics . . . they try, as you know, to get singular broken colours and greys in the cheviots — or to get the very brightest colours in balance against one another in the multicoloured tartans. . . . [R]ather than the fabric clashing, the overall effect of the pattern is harmonious from a distance. A grey that’s woven from red, blue, yellow, off-white and black threads, [and] a blue that is broken by a green and an orange, red or yellow thread, are very different from plain colours — that is, they vibrate more and make whole colours look harsh, whole, and lifeless. . . . [I]t’s not always exactly easy for the weaver or . . . the designer of the pattern or the colour combination, to work out his calculation of the number of threads and their direction — nor is it easy to weave brushstrokes together into a harmonious whole. If you saw the first painted studies that I made when I came here to Nuenen — and the present canvas — side by side — I think you’d see that as far as colour is concerned — things have livened up.”

For the rest of his life van Gogh incorporated this color theory into his work. Sometimes described as “troubled” and “frenzied,” his brushwork in the late 1890’s demonstrates the full, exuberant, joyful flowering of this fibre-art-based color theory.