Occasionally I am asked why, if I have devoted my academic career to teaching color design, do I print my own work in black and white. I offer the following as an explanation.

Every color whether it is reflected from a surface or transmitted as light, has four properties. To sum them up briefly, they are: 1. A color’s lightness and darkness, 2. It’s hue (or family name i.e. red, blue, etc.), 3. How strong or intense, or how weak that hue is, and 4. The temperature of the hue i.e. is it considered warm (blood, fire colors) or cool (sky, water, grass colors).

A hue, however, may sometimes present some basic problems to artists who are concerned with reproduction. A hue may translate very differently from one medium to another. For example, the same hue may appear one way on one monitor and look very different on another. A hue may also appear one way on a slide and again translate differently in a print of that slide. The problems are many.

The only single property of color able to stand by itself is the color’s lightness and/or darkness. This property by itself translates into black, white and grays. In other words, if the hue were removed from a color the remaining area would appear to be a gray that fell somewhere between white and black. Any hue, then, may be translated into a specific gray, and the relationship between the grays will always remain the same no matter how light or dark the whole print may be.

Aside from this point, I must add that I find the study and application of color design to be fascinating and I enjoy working with color immensely. It is only in my fine art photographs, where only light is the medium, that I find black and white images more satisfying.