Curious Yellow, Part II

"Phat Burrito"
9 x 12, oil on linen
(c) Lesley Powell 2015
(Available)

I have been outdoors painting on location a couple of times recently--whenever I could catch a spring day in between the winter ones! Curiously, I was drawn both times to things that were a very bright yellow. You may know that the color of an object, as perceived by the human eye, depends on the wavelengths of the light it reflects. When light hits an object, the object absorbs some of the rays, and reflects the others. Yellow things absorb less light, and reflect more light, than things of other colors. The fact that yellow objects reflect so much light explains why they are very bright. In painting terms,

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!

Painting by Lamplight

Painting (c) Antoine Vincent (France)

My last post found me struggling mightily to discern the right colors and values in an interior scene that featured a lighted lamp. That lamp can be quite beautiful. But the single bright bulb in a darkened room makes it very difficult to perceive the surrounding areas with any accuracy. Or at least it does for me. I remembered a great painter (was it Eugene Delacriox?) writing that when he was stumped, he would jump in the carriage

There's No Place like Home

"Blue Chair"
12 x 9, oil on linen
(c) Lesley Powell 2015
(Available)

During the past few weeks, I have been hunkered down in my studio weathering the last blast of winter. Of course I have done some still lifes, but I also decided to be more adventuresome and set up some "room vignettes". I can't take my messy oil paints into most people's homes to work on interior scenes, so I have to create my own interiors. Here's a dirty little secret: I often spend as much time setting up the scene as I do painting it. I understand from other painters that I am not alone in this. Shall we say

Fill 'er Up!

March 2015

Well, I have FINALLY met my goal--about a year and a half late! If you have been following that long, you know that when I moved into my new studio I made a challenge to myself. I set a goal of filling this jar with empty paint tubes within one year. To meet that goal would require me to be very generous with the application of paint to canvas. I was intent on painting lushly, putting great thick whorls of paint on the canvas. Ha!! Since then, I have signed two lease renewals, and have just now filled the jar. Instead of painting like a millionaire, I'm afraid I have been painting like a pauper. I think I'll empty the jar now, and see how long it takes me to fill it again. I'll see whether I will lessen my elapsed time. I'm betting I will. But perhaps I am by nature a painter who prefers a thin application of paint. As Maggie Siner has said, a big part of painting is resolving the matter of "Man meets Materials"!