Exercise 1: Exploring Contrasts

• Its interesting how the center colour shifts in apparent value based on the colour around it.
• Looking at the groupings around Napthol red (image, above), its interesting how colours in the same area of the colour wheel ‘push’ the central colour towards one primary or the other. ie, the first box, above, makes the center box look very orange. While the orange, and yellow make the center look quite red.
• When I put neutral tones around the center, it seems the chroma of the colour is enhanced. And vice versa.
• I shouldn’t be surprised that my eye keeps getting drawn to the complementary colour box.
• If I fail to (or choose to not) match the values, then the effect is more of enhancing the chroma due to being surrounded by “black”.
• There are a lot of pigments that are very similar. Napthol red (PR112) and Michael Harding Scarlet Lake (PR120) look extremely similar on their own. I should probably explore their separate mixing properties, but with this exercise it suggests they are roughly equivalent. I use the Napthol Red quite frequently, but received a sampler of the Michael Harding paints from a promotion at my local art store. Who am I to refuse?

Exercise 2: Successive Contrast

I used the big red dot in the syllabus initially. As I stared at the dot, I observed a few immediate effects:

• The edge of the red dot acquired a green-ish inner fringe as time went on.
• I perceived a variation in value against the white border – darker on the red side, and almost a halo on the outside.
• I did not perceive a green after image — I saw a strikingly cyan after image. Only after that had faded almost out of sight could I get a hint of green. This is strange, as I would expect to see the complementary colour — I was using my monitor as a bright backdrop. Could the chromatic light coming from my monitor be affecting this?
• To test, I picked up a cyan-blue object — a “stress ball” in the form of a giant lego piece. I would expect to see orange in the afterimage, and indeed I did see a reddish-orange.
• I should expect to see purple if I look at yellow. Going back to my painted squares from the prior exercise, I indeed do pick up a vibrant electric purple. Interestingly, as I stared at the box under my high CRI lighting, I started to see brilliant colour-complement fringes around all the boxes as my eyes started to fatigue. Fascinating effect.
• This leads me back to why I was seeing cyan when looking at red. I saw the same effect when looking at my painted squares. Am I thinking, here, too much about the RBY additive colour wheel and should be thinking about the CMY subtractive? curious.

Research 2.3: Optical Effects

As part of Project 1, I’d followed the rabbit hole of Impression and Post-Impression as I read on Chevreul. It was definitely interesting to read about the soap opera social dynamics between the various artists². Anyway, I thought to follow other paths in my reading here.

Op Art

Abstract movement, leveraging optical illusions. Interesting how art has always played upon how the brain to create illusionistic spaces, and then we see Op Art taking the dial up to eleven. Inducing perceptions of movement, contraction and colour shift.

Exercise 3a: Colour Accuracy

This is hard. Worthwhile things usually are, I suppose. I restricted myself to 3 pigments (+ b/w): Cadmium Lemon, Cobalt Teal, Quinacridone Magenta. I cheated a bit with the scissor handles and used a bit of Napthol Red to help me with the intensity.

I was trying to avoid creating a finished painting, and just focus on the colours. I kept having to pull my attention back to mixing what I saw in my set up, rather than what I wanted to see.

I got a bit caught up in the idea of fabric, and using my brush to create impressions of threads and weave. Messy, but interesting idea to think about later. The fabric is extremely pale, and I really struggled to get the right colours. From my seat at the easel, the colours look reasonable. As soon as I stand up, my reference looks more yellow.

The ball of twine was interesting. Looking at it now, it is far too yellow and needs to be more brown and grey.

Despite the lack of form, I’m very happy with the scissors. Though I could have done highlights on the handles.

Doing this exercise I started having ideas for my assignment. Could I revisit this same set of items, but rendered entirely in flat squares, and triangles? I think the answer is ‘yes of course’, but I want to think through how I’d draft the image and then choose the colours.

Exercise 3b: Still Life with Complementary Colours

I realized, a bit late, that I’d set up the composition using complementary colours. When choosing the items, I’d grabbed the scissors and had asked myself “how to make these pop”. A low chroma green was my solution. I suppose, in retrospect, I could have chosen a different set of pigments for this exercise (orange/blue?) but had already gone down the path of red/green by the time I made this realization.

To give myself a break from mixing from primaries, I chose two pigments to work with: Alizarin Crimson and Pthalo Emerald (+white — no black used). They’re both very strong pigments. From what I’d read pthalo greens are “red-killers” and I wanted to know what that meant. I’m not sure I learned, in this case, as I was able to create quite the range of interesting greys and violets out of these two.

The biggest challenge I faced was how to represent the twine, but I figured the violet-greys would be the best outcome as I couldn’t get to an orange/brown with what pigments I limited myself to.

I much prefer how I rendered the fabric (on the right-hand side) here.

Exercise 3c: Still Life with colour to evoke mood

I chose to skip this exercise of the three, and come back to it later in the unit. I was struggling with considering what colours would evoke a mood in this particular case. I think I was getting caught up in the subject matter.

Though, as I look at what I did in exercise 3b, it does have a somewhat washed out, and creepy tone to it. the red of the scissors handles is definitely evocative. If I’d chosen different complements for 3b, it would definitely have fit with this exercise. A yellow/purple choice might be an interesting one to explore.

Sketchbook

A variety of painting explorations can be found here. In particular I found exploring interventions into cold wax medium to be quite interesting, as well as paint handling of some clothing on a figure-painting experiment.

A variety of notes from exhibitions, and various ideations can be found here . One part, looking at Henry Moore sculptures, got me futher thinking about dry wax interventions.

Bibliography

¹ Episode 48: Anselm Kiefer’s Margarete and Sulamith (1981) (s.d.) In: The Lonely Palette. Directed by Avishai, T. 55 minutes 42 seconds. At: https://soundcloud.com/the-lonely-palette/episode-48-anselm-kiefers-margarete-and-shulamith-1981 (Accessed 01/09/2022).

² Roque, G. (1996) ‘Chevreul and Impressionism: A Reappraisal’ In: The Art Bulletin 78 (1) pp.27–39.