Interview with Luanne Stovall: A New 21st Century Color Literacy Paradigm

Luanne Stovall is an artist and color theorist with an MFA in painting from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She attended the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture (New York City), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, Maine).

Luanne is a member of the Steering Committee of the global Colour Literacy Project and a visiting lecturer in the School of Design and Creative Technologies at the University of Texas in Austin. Currently she is teaching Color Literacy as an upper level interdisciplinary course in the School of Design and Creative Technologies at the University of Texas at Austin.

She has taught color courses and workshops in many locations including UT Austin, The Contemporary Austin; School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Wellesley College, MA; and MIT Sloan School of Business. Her paintings and works on paper have been exhibited widely, and are in private and public collections, including the Art Museum of South Texas; El Paso Museum of Art; Blanton Museum, Austin, TX; Moakley Cancer Care Center, Boston; and the Estee Lauder Collection.

Luanne’s website:
https://www.luannestovall.com/

The Colour Literacy Project, Steering Committee member:
https://colourliteracy.org/

Inter-Society Color Council, Board of Directors member; Team leader, Fluorescent Fridays
https://www.iscc.org/

2023 International Colour Association (AIC), volume 33,
Special issue on contributions by the Colour Literacy Project Team:
https://aic-color.org/journal-issues

Luanne’s contribution to the 2023 AIC volume 33:
Prologue: one artist’s journey from traditional colour theory to the Colour Literacy Project (PDF)

University of Texas Color Literacy course
Designed as four modules:

  • Color Perception
  • Color Interaction
  • Color Psychology
  • Color Design / Portfolio Project.

University website: AET Courses (Search under the Upper Division tab.)

Hero’s Journey / Art

As a representative of my studio work, I’m sharing a few images from a series of gouache paintings that I sometimes refer to as my “Monet Haystacks”. The protagonist is a leafcutter ant, travelling through the course of one day (6 paintings in the daylight, 6 in the night) across time and landscapes.

Like a haiku, the tiny hero is always viewed in the same position, just past the center of the panel, moving along on her mission to bring sustenance back to her colony. My sense is that everyone (including the smallest citizens of the earth) is a hero, risking life and limb every day as we venture into the unknown that is ever unfolding.

This work also shows that beauty of the light during the day and also the colors of the light in the night. That there is darkness in the light and light in the darkness –  a manifestation of the yin/yang principle. This, of course, is directly related to our conversation about the primal force of light, the force that is necessary for the phenomenon of color to be experienced. 

Listen to the episode