Bruce Marsh Commented on Josef Albers in reference a recent post on Giorgio Morandi. He presented the challenge of finding three colors that would create the sense of two colors overlapping – if I understand correctly. It made me wonder if this daunting task could be automatically solved by the computer.
I heid to my Adobe Illustrator and drew two identical rectangles. One I colored green and the other a lavendar. I rendered both 50% transparent and slid one rectangle partially over the other. This created an intermediate hue; the rectangles acting like translucent panes. I then rearranged the panes by sending one back, and where the intermediate hue had been a green over lavendar, the new effect was lavendar over green. Overdoing it, I then introduced a offset shadow effect, which created the appearance of actual translucent objects. Not done, I tried red and yellow at a greater opacity.
Would Albers – having been kept ignorant of the means employed – approved?
Jay,
Nice work! Your green/lavender pairs illustrate the point made in the Transparency and Space set of Albers’ plates, namely that altering the overlap color alters which rectangle appears to be in front. There is at least one plate where the overlap color is systematically varied and one can find the transition. Of course, vary the overlap color in hue and you soon get three adjacent rectangles, rather than a pair overlapping.
I’m not sure–but the speculation is interesting anyway–Albers would completely approve your computer-aided method. He normally worked (and had students work) with colored papers, so part of the training was to learn to identify the needed paper for a particular effect from among similar ones. And then experiment relentlessly.
The transparency can be achieved easily with any image editing software, as you have done, Jay. But your examples may also be read as adjacent strips of related colors. Albers was interested in the students having the experience of finding 3 pieces of colored paper which would make a compelling illusion of transparency, and in so doing begin to be able to identify the actual component colors of an illusion. A very useful skill for painting….applicable to seeing the colors of shadows, the colors of reflections, the colors of reflected light, etc. Useful for walking around in the world, also.
A component of the problem is also to choose an arrangement of shapes for the three colors in order to create a compelling illusion.To arrange them so they cannot be seen as simply adjacent colors.
Albers also then asked students to create space with transparency….for example…arrange a group of colors in which one color seems very far behind another, and then seems closer and closer, and then seems in front of the other color, and then seems very far in front of the other color.See:
http://web.mit.edu/deansgallery/albers/Albers.JPG
Here’s an interactive implementation of the transparency problem on the web: http://www.rotorbrain.com/foote/interactive/hacks/colorinteraction2.html
Notice that as you change the colors one or the other of the colored squares
advances; seems to come forward in space or it may be seen as becoming translucent…like colored tissue paper, not colored glass
If the demo allowed you to also change the color of the background you could also create the illusion of a colored light, falling partially on all three surfaces…..and then a shadow of another color!…and then the illusion of a mist laying over the top, and then………
But; the monitor lacks the ‘eureka!’ impact of making it happen with colored papers you have found. They are physical and opaque…and magically seem transparent when they create the illusion.
At the beginning of the course each student was asked to spend a few days finding hundreds of swatches of colored paper.
Many art students, and artists I’ve known, really disliked these exercises…so linear, so difficult, so objective, so boring! I always felt they never had that moment of discovery…never saw the magic of their eyes acting as complex image processing systems.
A Footnote: The principles of the interaction of color were first studied and published, in the mid 19th C., by a chemist named Chevreul. He built an entire system of color which recognized the ways in which colors are strongly influenced by their surroundings. All the examples in his book, “The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and their Applications to the Arts”, were created with colored thread. It came out of work he did with the Goebblin Tapestry Works. Seurat based his color work on Chevreul’s ideas, and Albers took it from there.
Color is endless….colored light vs. paint….red and green mixed together, in light, create Yellow! One is an additive system, one subtractive. Perception…physiology, physics,….color across cultures….wandering through history…do we still see the world as Kodachrome…”I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away”
Bruce,
Thanks for the demo links. The second site also has a more conventional color interaction demo at http://www.rotorbrain.com/foote/interactive/hacks/colorinteraction1.html .
Do you consciously use some of the Albers lessons in choosing colors in your painting? I’m thinking particularly of the similar valued blue and green in your Bay Chop with its very convincing appearance of the water surface.
Steve and Bruce:
Albers would have rapped my knuckles with a ruler. I felt vaguely dehumanized by the exercise – taking a shortcut – being a superannuated slacker. And he would have told me so in no uncertain terms.
Who besides Albers has used these effects in his or her art? Names aren’t popping into my head. Morris Louis in his veils perhaps. A lot of other color field work…perhaps. Stella at a certain point. I remember driving past a storefront out in L.A. where it appeared that a featureless white box interior was evenly illuminated in a single hue. I was on my way to a nighttime rendezvous with Hollywood Forever and was therefore preoccupied. Was that Irwin?
I’m going to post some further thoughts on color and light soon, on my blog.
Jay; The gallery with the front wall removed, in Venice, was Irwin…early 70’s I think…and the cover of the paperback “Seeing is Forgetting…..” by Weschler.
Steve and Jay; The Albers ideas have been extremely important in all my painting. As a student I had diddly squat in terms of color theory or just plain color information. I would occasionally hit, in painting, a particularly strong color event…but I had no idea of the mechanics, and simply meandered around the palette in a trial and error fashion.
I fortunately began teaching with colleague who had studied at Rhode Island SD, and who persuaded the library at this Jr. College to buy the then new Albersw book…I think it was $600. back then! I then spent a year doing screen prints…in my kitchen…and laboriously getting the color experience I needed to be a more informed painter.
ALL the phenomena are involved in almost all painting! And artists from forever have somehow known…intuitevly (sp?), some better and some worse, how colors effect and are effected by their neighbors. Impressionists are the prime example…but so are byzantine mosaics…etc. Artists who have made the color phenoms a primary focus include the optical folks of the 60’s…Riley, Vasarely, Anuskiewicz,etc, and the geometric abstractionists Stella, E. Kelly, Poons, etc. Not to mention both Irwin and Turrell…who pressed the ideas into an expanded arena.
Albers ideas and exercises can help bridge the gap between color perception and color sensation……I see the sidewalk is passing under a shadow….but what is the specific color of that shadow. To make convincing illusions, in paint, frequently requires fairly wild color inventions. I’d offer Bonnard as a good example.
Bruce:
So Irwin is the instigator. Actually, the storefront in question was some five years ago or so. Could be somebody is keeping the jive alive.
Bruce:
This is a little off topic, but I have two questions. Took a look at Bay Chop and noted the degree of consistency throughout the painting. I assume that you need to find a source of consistency inside while painting and would ask how you achieve it. Secondly, I was admiring those little airport pictures that you have up on your site. For such small items, they are remarkably airy and have a fine sense of progression. I would have to have my elbows supported, and my general self in a clamp to introduce that level of detail into such a small space, and you appear to be doing it out in a field. Is there a mahl stick involved? Do you breathe? How far are your eyes from the surface?
Hey Jay…
I can give a couple of simple answers,…as much as I know.
The studio work, such as Bay Chop and most of my painting over the years, has been from photos I make. I paint from prints, generally around 5 X 7. The consistency comes from simply handling all the elements in a similar way…I work all over the painting, beginning witha 2 or 3 inch brush, and wash the whole thing in in an afternoon. Then I go to a 1″ brush and make a pass around the whole surface, with more opaque paint and fuller color, in a couple of days. Then I make repeated passes around the canvas, with perhaps a 3/4″ brush, for a couple of weeks….the paint is never thick, and the color is consatntly increasing in contrast and becoming more saturated.
I’ve been concerned for years with the idea of the whole painting being equally active…one field of activity…no empty places, every part getting equal attention.
In the small pieces I do get close to the surface, and I steady my hand with my pinky..against a dry spot. It is outside…the heat here is beginning to get to me, but I’m determined to paint outdoors all summer. I think the ‘airyness’ comes from a fairly pale palette, with relatively small areas being quite dark.
I badly need to update my website, much of the recent onsite stuff is not there. There are several small (6 X 13) pieces from Utah, ’07, under ‘Recent work’. Those painted onsite are noted as such under caption.
Also; those painted onsite are never worked on later,,,they remain as onsite studies. I once tried fixing one a bit later in the studio and it was a disaster.
Thanks for your interest!
Trying to keep up and cannot find ‘Bay Chop’!
Bruce:
Must be some pinky! Another question: how does such vastness captured in such a small container work as a seen object? It would seem that the viewer must first peer in – focus on something very nearby – before taking in the implied sense of distance. Makes me think of a periscope for some reason. You have met June Underwood on this site. June often paints relatively small images of big subjects, and I have had similar thoughts concerning her work – I just haven’t brought it up to her yet.
Also, regarding Bay Chop, I take it you are familiar with Vija Celmins, who is also interested in watery surfaces.
Birgit,
Bay Chop was originally linked from comment #3. You can also find other water paintings on Bruce’s web site, http://brucemarsh.net , a couple under Recent Paintings and more under Painting Archive. I think you’ll find them useful studies for your particular passion.
Jay,
A current example of an artist playing with the transparency/overlap ambiguity is Tomma Abts in some of her geometric abstractions, especially the first in this slide show.
Following up on David’s suggestion, I think I’ll try some of the Albers color pairs in my experiments in colorization, just to see what happens.
Steve:
I notice that Tomma Abts includes actual shadow-isms that come and go. Does Albers cover this use of a spatial device?
Albers doesn’t discuss any of the issues regarding creating illusions with light and shadow. Lots of interesting stuff there, but that ground has been plowed over for a few hundred years. Photography certainly has introduced new concerns…primarily the thorough study of how light may be rendered within the limited range of photo papers. (Zone systems, sensitivity curves, etc….)
I had another thought about the transparency issue…a good example is in the mechanics of reflections…what color is a gray sidewalk when reflected in a red plastic storefront?? It’s a very related issue…and Richard Estes comes to mind….. http://www.artnet.com/usernet/awc/awc_workdetail.asp?aid=139829&gid=139829&cid=17191&wid=425967390&page=25
Look at the difference, in color, between the bus reflected on chrome, and the bus reflected on glass.
He’s painting from photos, but he is constantly finding the color in paint which relates precisely to the photo. I remember his paintings being quite remarkable in a close view…they are made of, quite clearly, daubs of paint.
Wow, I tune out for a few days, and look what I miss!
I had two vastly different experiences with Color Theory courses. The first was the one I took as an undergraduate. The administration, in the their wisdom, assigned the course to a newly-hired faculty member who made beautiful pencil drawings and knew absolutely nothing about color. She must have found some book on the subject, and had us painting color charts in gouache. A useful exercise perhaps in color mixing, but we learned nothing from it about color interaction.
When I got to grad school years later, I took a Color Theory class with John Roy, who had been Josef Albers’ teaching assistant at Yale, and who became, in his own right, a respected researcher and teacher in the field of color perception. We did the Albers’ exercises, and others that John came up with, mostly using the packs of Coloraid paper that Albers had used in his courses. I actually found them to be fascinating and incredibly useful.
Jay, I think that your way of creating the illusion of transparency on the computer has value as a demonstration, but it doesn’t accomplish the same thing as the exercises, the point of which is to develop and refine the student’s perception and intuitive grasp of color relationships. Your demo shows what color transparency looks like (the same thing can be accomplished by laying a colored gel over part of another colored surface on your dining room table), but it doesn’t teach you the difference between an intermediary color that creates the illusion of transparency and one that doesn’t. You don’t get that “aha!” moment that you get when you’ve been trying a bunch of colors that don’t quite create the illusion, and then you find the one that does.
Beyond the many structured assignments we did in that class, the most interesting exercises were the “free studies” that we did over the course of the semester, where we took the things were were learning and created improvisations. I think I learned more in that class than in any other class I had in art school. After taking the course from John, I ended up assisting him in teaching it for 3 more semesters, which was in itself a great learning experience.
David:
Hey! I’m just the messenger here. Might notice that there appears a sort of consensus that the computer got it right. Why? Because It’s Adobe?
I wonder how students knew if and when they had gotten an intermediate right. Albers? An important lesson that I would draw from this is a certain relativism in the process. For all of the straight-edged probity in his approach, Albers may have been pointing out an important breeze blowing through the atmosphere of art.
Jay,
Adobe got it right because the optics is predictable, whereas the right color choice may be hard to see (in advance of trying it) if you’re a student looking at a selection of colored papers.
An exercise that Adobe can’t do is choose two different colors that will look the same on two different given backgrounds. That’s the demo mentioned in comment #3 (though the first preset backgrounds gave a less dramatic effect for me).
The intermediate orange in the red/yellow example in my illustration doesn’t satisfy. I’d choose something a little punchier in paper mode.
Jay, no argument from me about Adobe getting it right. And I wasn’t criticizing you for the post, just trying to answer your question, “Would Albers … have approved?”.
If I were doing something that required creating the illusion of transparency, I’d probably use Photoshop to figure it out. I’m all for using the best tools for the job.
My point is just that the purpose of the Albers exercises isn’t getting a correct result, it’s developing a set of perceptual skills. If I wanted to become a better runner, I would do it by setting up and sticking to a training routine. But if my goal is to get to my destination as fast as possible, I’ll probably drive.
David:
That’s the way I see it. I’ve been passed by runners while trapped in irksome traffic jams.
Ha! Have you seen the movie Office Space? There’s a scene at the beginning where one of the characters is sitting in traffic, and gets passed by a guy w/ a walker.
David:
Is that the one with the stapler?
Yes.
Don’t believe I’ve seen it.