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!

What's in the Tube

A thoughtful reader recently wrote me about my post on the invention of the metal paint tube. She pointed out that it was not so much the tube itself that gave birth to Impressionism, but rather what was IN the tube. Yes, indeed.  It is no mere coincidence that the Impressionist movement came at the same time as the Machine Age and the industrialization of Europe. In fact, breakthroughs in chemistry and physics gave us a huge number of new pigments, as well as a new way of understanding light and color. Together these were the catalyst for an entirely new way of painting.


The years between1825 and 1870 saw the invention of at least ten new pigments. Among them were colors that became staples of the Impressionist palette, such as cobalt yellow, artificial ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, cerulean, viridian, alizarine and zinc white. Most of these pigments were very opaque. Their opacity meant that, instead of having to use layer upon layer of thin paint to build up color, as had traditionally been the case, painters could cover the canvas in a much shorter time. They could thus capture a scene quickly, even in one or two sessions outdoors on location.

Eugene Boudin (1824-1898), on location

These years brought us not only new colors, but also new theories of color. Eugene Chevreul, an industrial color chemist, wrote extensively about the nature of color and light. He articulated the law of "simultaneous contrast", by which a color appears brighter and more intense when placed next to its complement. Here's an illustration:

Other chemists were expanding on the work of Isaac Newton, who had shown by using a prism that white light contained all other colors of light. Nowadays we take this idea for granted, having seen the illustration below since we were children. But it was a new concept at the time.

Impressionism was born in the midst of--or perhaps even as a result of--these breakthroughs. There was a new understanding of how we see light. At the same time, that there were new paints which would allow painters to work quickly to capture the fleeting effects of light. No wonder that with Impressionism, light itself became the subject of paintings. As said in the North Carolina Museum of Art's "Revolution in Paint","The Impressionist came to see the world as flicking light and color, a jumble of prismatic light reflected to our eye. The pigments on their palette were not just colors; they were the ingredients of light."

I think that Monet's series of paintings of the Rouen cathedral is a great illustration of how the Impressionists painted light. Take a look at the examples below. It is clear that Monet is not just painting the cathedral facade---he is painting the LIGHT on the facade. And so a new way of painting is born...

"Rouen Cathedral, Facade and the Tour d'Albane, Gray Weather", 1894

"Rouen Cathedral, West Facade, Sunlight", 1894

"Rouen Cathedral, Setting Sun", 1894

Stay tuned for upcoming installments on technical advances in paint manufacture, and other theories of color and color perception--and how they changed the way we paint.