Colour use in Pop Art
Popular Art, shortened to Pop Art, is a visual art movement that emerged between 1958 and 1975. It depicted common everyday objects of the time as a way of portraying elements of popular culture.
The style of Pop Art employs a wide range of colours that are non-representational and therefore not used to convey the artist’s inner sensations of their surrounding world. The artists’ choice of colours are based upon the existing connotations to repeated objects within the popular culture thereby drawing upon the recognition factor of those colours. These colours are often bold, flat colours with distinct, hard edges. The artist used bright colours when they wanted to give the image the superficial appearance of an advertisement and these colours were often strident in appearance.
Pop artists achieved maximum impact with minimum colour through the use of complementary colours (one colour is used with its direct opposite on the colour wheel). The use of complementary colours in the same image made the other appear more intense due to the lack of common colour properties between them. These colours also drew attention to each other depending on the amount of each used in the image.
The use of white was also used to achieve this effect. Vivid colours were broken up with the shade of white as a way of giving the image the effect of depth and ambiguity.