• Let's Have some fun! With there being music galore during this season, I thought it would be fun to revisit a post I
introduced in 2011. Enjoy! 2700 years ago a Greek philosopher named Pythagoras standardized musical tuning into a system he called the Circle of Fifths. It was he who diagrammed the relationship of our twelve major keys, an invaluable tool for composers and musicians in Western music. Within Pythagoras' Circle of Fifths, we can locate any key and find its related chords. Here's how it looks: To see how this works, locate C on the circle. Glance to the left of C and you'll see F, look to the right to find G. C, F and G are the three major chords in the key of C. In the little circle underneath them are the minor chords related to the key
of C. Now here's the fun part: four hundred years ago the traditional Color Wheel was diagrammed by Sir Isaac Newton. This wheel also is a twelve-part unit. The relationships of the hues on the color wheel are similar to that of the chords on the
Circle of Fifths. Any color belongs in harmony to both colors on either side of it on, where all three have a single hue in common. No different from the Circle of Fifth's importance to musicians, the Color Wheel is the work horse of visual artists. The more a musician learns about the Circle of Fifths, the richer the music can be, and the more a visual
artist learns about the Color Wheel, the more fertile the possibilities are in painting and design. And not unlike how a composer sets a musical piece in a key, the artist has the ability to set the key of a painting, giving it
the same sort of unity as a key gives a piece of music. The two paintings below are typical examples of placing a painting within a key. Left, "Weaver" by Richard Schmid Right, "In a Moscow Cafe" by
Robert Genn Here is how each is positioned "in key" on our traditional Color Wheel: Have yourself a colorful and musical weekend! During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
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