(4) Self-Reliance Mutates into Odd Conceits

I had been vaguely dissatisfied for some time with the passive way in which paintings had traditionally been conceived.   Pigments just absorbed color from the ambient light and passed back to the viewer whatever was left.  I also didn't like the way that in conventional painting, colors always got darker when they combined.  I had in mind to serve up something more exciting to my viewers than dark leftovers.

I wanted my paintings to be more "active"--somehow more vitally and directly involved with the process of sending light to the viewer's eye.  I knew that the light a painting sends is only reflected, but so what?  So is moonlight, and we don't consider it any less interesting, or any less a form of light, for that.

In my new style of "light source" painting, darker "base" colors originated in bands or geometric shapes.  Where shapes overlapped, instead of becoming darker, the intersection areas became lighter--i e., increasing the total light energy sent to the viewer's eye, in about the same way they would have done if the paintings had possessed their own autonomous light energy.

Another way to describe my new process was that I was simulating the additive admixtures of colored light. 

A certain amount of guesswork was called for in figuring out how such additive combinations ought to look.  I went by hunches and intuition, and by subjective judgments about when things looked right.

Perhaps the trickiest part was dealing with additions of complementary colors, like blue and orange.  Here, I reasoned that the existence of elements of red, blue, and yellow in the same space would create a "unit of white," which would lighten the intersection markedly. 

The visual effects that I created based on this conclusion turned out to be quite plausible.  People tended to have no trouble recognizing or accepting the color overlay process in my paintings, or in identifying the base-level color "objects" whose interaction produced the effects.

In fact, probably the highest compliment I received on this technique's effectiveness was actually a misguided criticism.  Someone who fancied himself a bit of an art expert scrutinized one of my paintings and asked what medium I had used.  When I told him it was acrylic paint, he launched into a lengthy and vaguely scolding explanation about the time and effort I could have saved, while achieving an identical result, if I had simply used transparent dyes.

(In actuality, every color combination that this person so easily took for granted would have been impossible, had I been using dyes.  But I took his misunderstanding as reasonably strong evidence that, as far as the viewer's brain was concerned, my hypothetical additive color combinations registered as "accurate.")

A few theoretical issues about color still troubled me at this point.  For example, why was it that yellow reached its greatest level of vividness at such a light level on the value scale?  Why did purple seem more intense when darker?  And why were the other colors strongest in the middle values?  Did it have something to do with their position in the spectrum, with yellow, more or less in the middle of the spectrum, being the most "like light?"

Still, these questions were more intriguing than daunting.  I did not experience any serious theoretical shocks until, in a well-intentioned attempt to increase my understanding of additive color admixture, I happened upon a physics book.


© COPYRIGHT 1993 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.