Face Off

I recently painted a "beret series"--a group of oil sketches featuring French men, women and children wearing berets. Working on this series has enhanced my already great respect for artists who paint figures and portraits. The slightest little angle can change an expression completely--or make the subject go from handsome to ugly. I spent hours  adjusting and re-adjusting eyes and mouths my French folks. And these are just "sketches"!

"Red Beret I"
10 x 10, Oil on Canvas
(c) Lesley Powell 2020

Why are faces so hard to get right? It's largely because the human eye and brain are exquisitely sensitive to very slight changes in human facial expressions. In fact, we have a specialized brain module that is devoted exclusively to processing faces. Because of this specialized module, we have very fine "within-face discrimination". An image that presents as a face is automatically processed by the specialized module. Thus, whenever we see a face, we are geared up to make very fine judgments of very slight differences.

"Boy in Beret"
10 x 10, Oil on Linen
(c) Lesley Powell 2010

For proof, consider the top photo in this post. In it, the faces are shown upside down. They probably look fairly similar to you. Because they are upside down, they don't present to our brains as faces. And because they are viewed as something other than faces, we don't use the specialized "face" module in our brains to interpret them. As a result, we don't make ultra fine distinctions between the images. They look rather similar. But. But! Just look at the photo below. 

When the faces are rightside up, our brains read them as faces, which triggers use of our special module. One glance tells us that things are quite amiss with the woman on the right. Yikes! I can study the top photo at length and not discern these differences. Yet one split second glance at the real photo, and I realize that things are horribly off. What an amazing illustration of the heightened sensitivity with which we view human faces. 

The illustrations of the "face inversion effect" are from Margaret Livingstone's book Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing. Can't wait to learn more from this book! 

Choice Overload

I recently heard a talk on the subject of "Choice Overload".    Choice overload is a cognitive situation in which people have a difficult time making decisions when they are confronted with lot of different options. The more options they are given, the harder it becomes to choose among them. It can happen when ordering from a menu at a restaurant, or in the wine aisle at the grocery store. I can certainly relate to this phenomenon from personal experience!

I was reflecting on choice overload when it suddenly struck me--one reason that I love using a limited palette is that it helps me avoid choice overload. I put only seven colors on my palette: cadmium yellow medium, cadmium red light, alizarin crimson, cerulean blue hue, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna and raw umber. And white, of course. From these colors, I can mix any other color I need.

When I go to mix a color that is somewhere in the yellow range, I don't have to stop and wonder which yellow to start with. [FYI to you non-painters, there are many, many yellows,  and some painters put multiple yellows on their palette, including Naples yellow, Cadmium lemon, Cadmium yellow light, Hansa yellow (light, medium and deep), etc. You get the idea.]. With only one yellow on my palette, I reach for it automatically, and get to mixing. No choice overload!

Unfortunately, a painter can't avoid choice overload altogether. The real panoply of choices arrives when you start trying to identify what you are seeing. Among the vast visual information that makes up the landscape, where is the darkest dark? the lightest light? the most intense color? Is that red awning leaning toward the blue, or the yellow?

And there are even more choices to be made when mixing colors from the paints that come out of the tubes. For me, there is no fixed formula. Instead, there are many different ways to arrive at the same color. Hmmmm: perhaps a subject for a future post...

From Pollution to Paint

Faithful readers know that I am a huge fan of Gamblin's gray-toned paint called "Torrit Grey". It is manufactured with the pigments gathered from the factory's air filtration system when it is cleaned every year. Such a great recycling of tiny waste particles of all types of pigments! I've written more about it here. 

Now Gamblin has gone a step beyond. They have just released a trio of paint colors called "Reclaimed Earth".  The Gamblin team has gathered water that has been contaminated by toxic sludge, put the water into large vats, distilled out its pigments, and made those pigments into fine artists' paints. Not only does this yield some beautiful earth colored pigments, it purifies the water so that it can be returned to the rivers from whence it came. It may be an over-used term, but if this isn't a win-win, I don't know what is.

This effort has involved artists, engineers, environmentalists and students from Ohio University. It caps a decades long effort to find a sustainable solution to the toxic sludge that seeps from abandoned coal mines along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.  Initial funding was provided through Kickstarter, and ultimately involved the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. It's a great story, and you can read the full plot here.

I can hardly wait to get my hands on some "Brown Ochre", "Rust Red" and "Iron Violet". It will be fun to see how these colors play with others, and I love a good earth tone palette. Plus 20% of the proceeds are returned to the recycling project. And the packaging is sustainable too! I hope that these colors will be a hit with painters, and will remain in production, continuing to contribute to the clean up of our rivers.