An Exploration of Color

Jake Hernandez grew up in Houston, Texas where his frequent visits to the Museum of Fine Arts introduced him to the works of Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian. Inspired by these artist’s use of color, Hernandez has leveraged his own understanding of color theory and mathematics to explore the complexity of this element for his honors thesis. In Colored Squares I and II, Hernandez created a process of random color generation from a set of blue, red, and yellow pigments to explore color in the absence of human bias. Since artists' personal biases and inclinations towards color affect our exploration of this element, Hernandez wanted to eliminate these obstructions to investigate color to a much greater extent. In Colored Landscapes I, II, and III, Hernandez used the primaries again in a more expressive style. Drawing inspiration from his travels across Europe and North America, Hernandez created new landscapes all his own. These studies offer a substantiated argument for the limits of art itself, showing artists have only explored a very small fraction of art's possibilities and that more exploration can be done in color and the other elements of art.