Now You See It...

Photo courtesy of BrainDen

Part of being a perceptual painter is studying human visual perception. Sometimes it seems that you have to be a physicist to understand how all of this stuff works. But even without understanding the "why", you cannot refute the fact that the same color looks quite different depending on what surrounds it. For example, both dogs you see above are exactly the same color. They just APPEAR to be different colors because of the colors that surround them. And then we have the classic checkers illustration below:

Squares A and B are exactly the same shade of gray. (I could say something here about 50 shades, but I won't). This is Adelson's well-known "shadow illusion". It is because of this principle that the painter Kevin Macpherson told us in his workshop that "Black in light is lighter than white in shadow". It's a tongue-twister, and sometimes a mind-twister too. Here's another example: planes A and B below are exactly the same color. No kidding. Test it out by putting your finger over the joint where they meet.

We painters need to understand these concepts so that we can make believable paintings from pigments that come out of tubes. Nothing that comes out of a tube can be as bright as the sunlight, or as dark as the ocean depths. So we painters have to create an illusion by juggling the COLOR RELATIONSHIPS. Eugene Delacroix certainly understood this when he said "I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will."

Delacroix knew that the same color looks quite different depending on what is next to it. Along those lines, the scientist Eugene Chevreul formulated the Law of Simultaneous Contrast. He noted that a color looks brighter and more intense when it is placed next to its complement. See how the orangy-red looks so much brighter when surrounded by its complement, blue:

It's really a bonanza for a painter to understand this concept and be able to apply it at the easel. I found out last summer that there is no way to make a lavender field seem as bright as it really is without bringing some dark green right up to it.

"Lavender Below Bonnieux"
8 x 12, oil on linen
(c) Lesley Powell 2014

Similarly, when I am having a hard time making terra cotta bricks look bright enough without washing them out, there is no better approach than introducing some blue into the surroundings. 

"Along the Lynx Line"
12 x 14, oil on canvas
(c) Lesley Powell 2014

It all goes to show--an artist must be a master of perception---and of deception!