look alikes
color blots
from Martha Gartside
tangled threads
from mending projects
crimson blot colours:
palest pink
deepest crimson
violet blue hues
purple rose
rose-leaf green
yellow seeds of rose
violet blot colours:
common crocus
purple lilac
deep purple lilac
palest green yellow
orange full tinted
An excerpt from my upcoming essay Prismatic Utopia on Gartside. And please note the footnotes, for none of this examination of Gartside would have been possible without the scholarship of Dr. Alexandra Loske.
Martha Gartside (1755-1819), a British watercolor instructor and theorist, wrote three instruction books, including her 1808 An Essay on a New Theory of Colours. Perhaps, the earliest nineteenth century woman to write and publish on both the theory and practical aspects of color, she insisted her pupils needed a command of color theory in order to become practicing artists. [1] Of course, Gartside constructed a color wheel, but her inventive ‘color blots’ showed both range and contrast and could rightly be the first abstracted painted image. She explained, “each blot is a group of flowers…They are merely compact blots of colours, exhibiting the effect produced by arranging them according to the theory delivered.”[2] Her orange blot features the harmony of deep orange and scarlet nasturtiums contrasted with the “darkest shade of blue and darker green leaves.” [3] The blot glows golden as the sun on a horizon, grounded by deep red rocks and blue-black indigo waves or as she would have it, orange nasturtiums with deeply colored leaves.
[1] M.Gartside, An Essay on A New Theory of Colours, (London: T. Gardiner: 1808). Internet Archive, accessed January 2023. https://archive.org/details/gri_33125015119437/page/n3/mode/2up. If one wants to read a concise and illustrative book on color theory and painting, there is no better than Gartside. For an examination of Gartside herself, see Alexandra Loske, Mary Gartside c. 1755-1819, Abstract Visions of Colour: A Woman Theorist in Georgian England, (London: Thomas Heneage Art Books: 2024). Since writing this book, Loske has determined Gartside’s first name was Martha instead of Mary.
[2] Gartside, 45.
[3] Gartside, 50-51.
