Maggie Maggio

Exploring Color in the 21st Century

The Colors of Cape Disappointment

Over the last few years I’ve explored the color of light in all sorts of ways using computers, gels, prisms and LED’s. I’ve learned how to describe the same color in many different languages – Lab, RGB, Hex, CMYK, etc. But none of that prepared me for the joy I felt this weekend seeing the colors of […]

Newsletter Feature of the Month: Optical Illusions

I copied and pasted this segment from the November newsletter I sent out yesterday.  Lots of fun links!  You can sign up for the newsletter on the right. Here’s a link to the November newsletter: Newsletter #2.

Color Scales for Artists – November 21st at OSA

With the help of generous support from Muse Art and Design, our local independently owned art supply store, I’ve spent the last year exploring color in traditional media – acrylic, oil, watercolor and gouache paint,  ink, colored pencil and pastel. As a result, I am now offering a workshop on making color scales in all […]

Treasure in North Carolina

I just got back to Portland after teaching three workshops in North Carolina and now have a Munsell Color Tree in the teaching studio at VIA Artistica! The east coast of NC is famous as the haunt of Blackbeard the pirate. The history is fascinating. Many believe his buried treasure is still out there somewhere along […]

Highlights from Racine

I am still recovering from last weekend in Racine. I was so intent on seeing and doing everything that I did not get many good photos. Bummer! I can’t possibly do justice to the whole weekend so I will just share my personal highlights. 

Racine Art Museum Symposium

I leave on Thursday for Racine Art Museum’s second Polymer Symposium at the Johnson Foundation at Wingspread in Racine, Wisconsin. It’s an honor to have a number of pieces in both the RAM (in)Organic show and the A Revisioning: New Works in Polymer show at the H.F. Johnson Gallery at Carthage College. I’m looking forward to seeing […]

Serpentine Gothic

Last week I mailed off four pieces for the upcoming “(in) Organic” show at the Racine Art Museum. Here’s one of the pieces along with a short story describing how it came to be. I was planning on making a loop on loop collar. I had it all sketched out at full scale. I made […]

40 Years of Color Mixing

Forty years ago today, I finished my first color mixing collection. Home for three weeks between the end of my summer job and the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I decided to mix 300 colors using only three colors of RIT dye. Why dyes? Because my favorite art form at the time was […]

The Winner’s Are . . . Ice-Cream Cones!

The winners of this year’s Alan Alda Flame Challenge “What is Color?” are Melanie Golub in the written category and Dianna Cowen, in the visual category. Both mention ice-cream cones when describing the cones of the eyes – a brilliant way to reach the 5th grade audience.  I’m now on the look-out for red, green and […]

Cutting into Color: Matisse at the Tate

One of the highlights of my short stay in London was visiting the Matisse show at Tate Modern on Easter Sunday. Now that I think about it, Easter was the perfect day to see the exhibit. Matisse almost died following colon surgery at the age of 71. He called the period after his near-death experience […]

New Inner Life of Cells

Another digitally animated film showing the inner life of a cell just came out from Xvivo in collaboration with Harvard’s BioVisions program. The first film from 2006 shows an immune cell responding to an infection. It’s a beautful short film. The colors are soft and subdued and the movement slow and graceful. http://youtu.be/wJyUtbn0O5Y The latest video in […]

Munsell on My Wall

Over one hundred years ago, Albert Munsell, an artist and educator, developed a color ordering system based on visual perception rather than mathemetical formulas.  The Munsell system soon became the industry standard and is still used today to communicate and reproduce colors accurately. I reference the Munsell system in my workshops whenever we talk about […]

Color and Light at NAEA Conference

I spent last weekend in San Diego at my first National Art Educators Association conference. It was huge – a three-day event with over 1000 seminars, 6000 attendees, and an exhibition hall filled with booths that included demonstrations by the major art supply manufacturers, samples from companies featuring teacher resources and talks by representatives from […]

All RGB Colors

Here are the amazing results when software architect József Fejes from Hungary responded to a geek challenge to create an image that contains exactly one bit of all the RGB colors. Enjoy!

International Colour Day Crystallography

To celebrate the fifth International Day of Colour and Light on March 21st, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology (ANSTO) assigned crystal structures to the colors of Newton’s spectrum. The banner graphically represents the structures that were selected to represent each color. Check out the ANSTO site to see why they were chosen. Fascinating choices – especially the […]

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