Number Six: Color

I once wrote a blog about light. I was, and still am, obsessed with light, or human vision. One of those great obsessions of mine is light as it appears as color. Color has been to me a great wonder and a great monster.

I’m the guy who, when painting from life, goes for the red tube of paint to paint an apple. I’ll explain. Imagine an apple sitting on a table in the sunlight. You dig into the archives of your memory and see the apple in your mind. You begin to paint. You’ve seen hundreds of apples in your lifetime. No problem. I’m sure nine out of ten non-artists who grab the red tube of paint and go to work on the canvas. The red that you would associate with a “red” apple is what artists call local color. Local color is the associated color of an object, like a yellow cone or school bus, a blue sky, a green leaf, etc. Now if I showed you an apple sitting on a tabletop and asked you to paint it, most people will go for the same red tube. The only problem with this strategy is that you no longer need the archives of your memory. The subject is in front of you. An artist doesn’t need the hundreds of apples they’ve seen in their lifetime to help them in this moment. They need only to look at the apple in front of them. They don’t even need the name “apple”. It isn’t useful. It’s a word. They’re painting an image.

If you experiment enough, you will come to find out that the apple is red in some places. It may also be a darker shade and less saturated than the pure red from the tube. It may also be a handful of colors not red. There may be purples, blues, oranges, pinks, and heck, even greenish hues on the surface of this apple. Light strikes the apples at every angle and bounces into the environment and back into your eyes. Color from the walls of the room are reflected onto the surface of the apple. Any light sources, like the window also reflect onto the surface. The surface that apple rests upon bounces its color back into the apple (ex. tablecloth). What once was a red tube of paint becomes a garden of color that exceeds your imagination. A garden that can only be seen by observing the scene in front of you.

Our eyes, though brilliant, adapt to help us navigate life. We can identify a white shirt as white under different lighting circumstances. We can recognize an apple as red under shade, in sunlight, under warm and cool light. It is helpful for non-artistic life to keep object constancy though circumstances change. This is not so helpful to the artist. Especially to the artist painting realism because an object, though identified as a single color, is not.

The solution is to practice. When we mix colors on our palette based on the scene in front of our eyes, we learn to see the errors of our perception. We look at the apple for what it is in the moment and not what we imagine or what we know about apples. A lifelong process indeed but truly fascinating. We don’t abandon the use of local color as it is a crucial part of our lives and a beautiful process. However, we embrace the variety of light and the joy of color as we work to make representations of the visual world in which we live. So, grab the red tube and then grab the blue one, orange, yellow, brown and white ones and get to mixing.

So color is my obsession. Color is my monster. I embrace my monster.

Fin.