I wanted to pass on some information from a Color Relationships workshop that is happening in Hawaii this fall. It's based on the teachings of the artist Joseph Albers as re-interpreted by Dick Nelson, who is an artist and educator that lives on Maui. The material associated with the workshop is available online, and i think some Studio Artist users might be interested in it. So here's a link to the Color Relationships Week 1.
The first week seems to really focus on getting across the notion that perception of color is about relationships between that color and the surrounding color environment it is in. For example, a particular physical color square can look very different depending on what other colors are surrounding it. So color perception of that particular color is really about relationships (as opposed to being absolute). The relationship between that color and others in it's immediate vicinity when you look at it. So the same physical color can look radically different to you depending on what it's surrounded by.
There are fun visual illusion experiments you can do to get this concept across. But it also is a phenomena that is going to be present in your paintings and digital art imagery as well. Understanding it better could allow you to take better advantage of it in a directed way in your artwork. Which is what i think later sessions of this ongoing workshop are going to try to focus on.
I'll pass on links to other online class materials for this ongoing Color Relationships workshop as they become available over the weeks.
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Between 1976 and 1980, I was teaching, in French and English, a 2-year course on Perception, a course I designed for the Social Sciences Department of the Algonquin College in Ottawa, Ontario.
That course was compulsory for all the Visual and Creative Arts students, and as it was commissioned by Social Sciences, I was able to focus on "perception in the first person," and not worry about aesthetics and self-expression.
I designed the course along the lines of the teachings of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and had number of very exciting years (students who took part in those special moents are still communicating with me today and keep on referring to those years as having been very important for what was to come later in their lives).
I had the good fortune of enjoying the help of a technician who was also an artist, and who became fascinated with what I was teaching. He had the resources and abilities to build several contraptions I designed, and one of those was a "light box" that had a number of coloured lights that could be modulated with rheostats, so that one could not only change hues, one could also change intensity. This was designed to modulate the colour of a simple shape (a rectangle) on a background, so that, for example, the background's colour and brightness could be kept constant while the "foreground" shape's colour and intensity could be modified, or vice-versa.
What this did demonstrated, beyond any doubt whatsoever, that a colour is never a colour "in-itself," but is always a colour because of its relationship with its context: keep that colour constant and change its background/context, and it becomes a different colour. Keep the background constant and change the colour/brightness of the foreground, and the background's colour shifts as well.
But there is more: we were also pursuing the exploration of perception, working/drawing "from the visible" (an approach I am convinced is utterly necessary if one is serious about Art, including, if not especially, "abstract" Art), and in doing so, we realized some important things: when a tonal shape in an object is identical to a contiguous tonal shape in another object, they merge into one, they form a pattern (what os also called a "passage").
Example:
When students start opening up to this level of perception, their work and attitude undergo a tremendous shift, and the excitement can sometimes become difficult to control.
But as the work continues, new elements appear: one can see a tonal shape in "this" object touch a similar tonal shape in "that object," but merging those shapes into one tonal passage does not do justice to the experience, and making them tonally different does not work either.
Their temperature is different, one tonal shape is cool, the other is warm, and that is when colour becomes utterly necessary, experientially justified, and painting, as per Cézanne and many others, can (finally) begin in earnest.
Few people reach this level of awareness, the seduction of self-expression can often be overwhelming, but those who can maintain their focus and continue to discover "how they see" enter a realm from which there is no return, and no desire to do so.
And that is something one can be extremely grateful for.
Make no mistake: all that applies/belongs to the perception of the "external world" fully applies, is utterly identical, to how one sees one's own work, be it done "from the visible, or "out of one's head."
No difference.
It sounds like you were trying some experiments similar to Edwin Land's Retinex experiments on color constancy.
It's fascinating how human color perception of the color squares in the mondrians is physically removed from the actual physics of the color wavelength spectra, which is what Land's color mondrian retinex experiments show off so well.
So color perception ultimately is a product of your mind, physically removed from the actual physics of the light. Based on the relationship to the context it is in, as you said above.
There's probably a lot more that could be done to try and build better understanding of color context into Studio Artist's automatic painting process. Something to think about for the future.
Anyway, i find Edwin Land's work and life pretty fascinating, so i hope the science lesson above is of some interest to people. Your comments about your experiments with colored lights and rheostats reminded me of his famous experiments.
Viewing that very interesting video above, I am constantly noticing a qualitative leap on the part of the scientist, and as it is a qualitative leap that is typical of the "habitual" (mis)understanding of our own perception, I'll try to briefly address it: there is a huge difference between what the object of perception "is" (the "reality out there") and how we see "it."
This is the well-known duality between "what is" (ontology) and what -and how- we see (epistemology).
As Maurice Merleau-Ponty (and before him Edmund Husserl) demonstrated, scientists often overlook the fact that the world they purport to "examine/explain" is first and formost constituted by their perception, and that that perception is far far far from being "objective."
To point to this, Husserl used an expression that has driven many people up the walls: "Natural phenomena are intentional acts of consciousness."
In a nut-shell, I'll hint at an "explanation" by quoting Merleau-Ponty: "We derive meaning from the experience while simultaneously projecting meaning into it."
As I am not a scientist, I'll talk about the issue of perception and its constitutive aspect from a painter's viewpoint: to the painter, what matters is not what a 'thing" is, but what it looks like (to the painter's eye, at this very moment).
Those who have done (for example) portraiture know well that in order for a portrait to be (relatively) successful, it has to be done by way of exaggerated features, bringing it to the edge of caricature. Only then will it manifest some of the looks and presence of the model.
There's a lot more to this than I could cover here (I have done tons of writing on this subject, much of it available on line, as in this series of articles: http://www.nondidjuti.net/animation/part_1.html parts 1, 3 and 4 especially).
One aspect that is absolutely essential in a work of Art is the qualitative difference between "sense-giving" and "sense-receiving" elements/areas which, when made manifest, is what gives the work a tension that differentiates it from mere wallpaper (or "visual karaoke," to stay connected to previous comments).
This tension is already at work, constantly, in our perception, whether we "know" it or not, but once this "always-already-there" process is noticed, it too completely shits the way we approach and conduct our own work.
Here's an example (which is used in "part 1" of the articles I mentioned earlier):
Even at the level of the physiology of vision, we have significant differences between central and peripheral vision (here the physiological and the psychological tend to mirror each other, I do explain that a bit more in depth in the articles I mentioned above), but people trapped in naïve/mundane perception wrongly believe that "the eye works like a camera and that we all see the same thing."
One thing I have mentioned several times before and that I would love to see SA "duplicate" (even mechanically) is this constant shift in our experience, a shift from "Where is it?" to "Aha! There it is!"
From "working from the outside in" to "working from the inside out."
From "stasis-reclaiming" to "flux-reclaiming" (from fear to boredom, from a need for stability to a need for change).
For sure, that would be mechanical when compared to hand-drawing driven by perception, but as with so many functions in SA, it could be like a relevant roughing-in of shifts in approaches that could then be honed by manual work.
To conclude: what applies to the perception of colour applies fully to perception as a whole, regardless of the "what" one is looking at.
As Merleau-Ponty puts it: "Perception is constitutive."
I've been working diligently on these issues for over 50 years (they are what got me into Art, and kept me at it), and the best summary I have come across so far was given to me by a Zen teacher (Edo Roshi) many years ago: "Things are not what they appear to be, nor are they otherwise."
I almost forgot: in the world of painting with natural media, the primary colours are not RGB, they are Red, Yellow and Blue (Green being obtained by the mixing of Yellow and Blue).
Part of Dick Nelson's workshop i believe involves getting painters to think in terms of color and color relationships being based on cyan, magenta, yellow mixing rather than red-yellow-blue. I believe this is based on what he learned as a student of Josef Albers.
Red & Blue are not primary colors from Richard (Dick) Nelson.
Mix Any Color from Richard (Dick) Nelson.
But it also makes total sense to me based on my work designing and building color ink jet printers. RGB is just the mathematical inversion of CMY. So if you are working with mixing light, RGB usually makes more sense, while if you are working with pigments, the CMY makes more sense.
Obviously we are always working with light on some level. And ultimately the actual perception of color is removed from the physical measurements due to the phenomena you've been discussing. And the neurological equivalents of how the brain actually creates a perception of color.
So if you think of the visual system as a series of hierarchy of modules, the low level ones have neurons that fire associated with the physics of the incoming light. But very quickly that gets abstracted, and later modules higher up in the hierarchy have neurons that fire associated with the actual perception of color, which as the experiments you alluded to and Land shows off above, is abstracted from the actual physics.
Many parts of the brain seem to work based on the detection of differences rather than absolute values. We're kind of discussing this in terms of color, but there are many other aspects to visual perception. And you would expect that they would involve similar phenomena.
So there might be similar phenomena involved in the perception of texture and shape. And you do mention caricature for example as being important to the development of feature representation, which again involves accenting differences.
You mentioned 'sense giving' and 'sense receiving' as an example of a visual perceptual quality. And the interactions of the two as being important. I'll try to read through the article link you mentioned to get a better sense of what you are talking about there. It sounds very intriguing, but i'm not sure i really understand what it means.
"Sense-giving" structures the "sense-receiving" elements/areas in ways that those areas could never accomplish on their own (it happens in time as well not "just" in/with still images).
Very often, this is like the "Aha!" experience, we may be looking at "something" sensing it is meaningful ("pregnant"), but unless we get that "sense-giving" trigger (a clue in fact), we can't make heads or tails out of the initial perception.
This happens all the time, I am even inclined to think that it is as ever-present as what we see when breathing in, and what we see when breathing out, but I don't want to go that deep here.
Here's a simple example from one of my old drawings that could make clear(er) what it is I mean:
1) is "sense-receiving"
2) is "sense-giving"
3) is the full image
Here's an old pdf handout from one of Dick Nelson's workshops on the Interactions of Color that i thought people might find interesting.
The discussion of Halation and how it can be used in artwork to create a sensation of enhanced luminosity in a painting is interesting. And there's also more discussion of color mixing.
In addition to being fascinating and useful information for artists, i think there's a lot of food for thought in all of this discussion about things that Studio Artist could try and be better at when automatically generating coloring. Both in the paint synthesizer color control panels, as well as in things like fully generative procedural artwork, for example the kinds of things that MSG creates. It would be nice to have more artistic ways of specifying the coloring options that get used when automatically generated procedural art is created in Studio Artist. I would like to add features to give artists more control over the coloring outcome of procedural art. I think we could add a much higher degree of sophistication and nuance to what we already have in place.
Interaction_of_Color.pdf
I am familiar with all the above "optical illusions" (note that in phenomenology, there are no "illusions" or "hallucinations," in the drive to "cater to the appearing as it appears," one must not differentiate between objects of experience by bringing in apriori knowledge of what is being looked at).
I believe that in fact, all we perceive is an "optical illusion" (hence my liking the following quote: "Things are not what they appear to be, nor are they otherwise").
Let's apply what those three circles can mean to painting/drawing "from the visible:" let's say one is painting or drawing a landscape "on location," and one sees a tree trunk which is of a certain tone and colour, showing itself against a dark background (the forest floor), but then against a bright background (the sky) as one's attention goes from the bottom to the top of the tree.
The naïve painter will paint the trunk the same colour and tone from bottom to top, but a more perceptive artist will notice, just as with the circles example above, that the trunk changes colour and tone depending of the background against which it is being seen.
Again, this level of awareness of perception has driven the better painters for centuries, there is a lot more to it than "just" how colours and tones create each other "in" the painter's eye, the position of a colour (and its shape, and quality of edges as well) on the picture plane will greatly influence the way it is being perceived (I did discuss that many many years ago with an animator, and have since seen very little evidence from the animation community of any understanding on its part of what so many painters consider to be "basic:" http://www.nondidjuti.net/animation/art_animation.html caution: this is a very old page that has not been updated in years, so some of the links there may be dead).
This is the stuff that has fuelled the passion of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Chardin, Turner, Monet, Cézanne, Giacometti, de Kooning, Pollock, Kline, Guston and so many others, and in spite (because?) it has been researched for so long, to os still a field that has an infinite number of possibilities that need exploring.
Part of what i'm trying to figure out is how to make Studio Artist have more of the 'eye' or 'awareness' of the experienced painter when it's doing automatic generation of artwork. So that the program itself will become more perceptually aware. It has some of that built into it already, but there is so much more that could be added.
Totally agree, and if some of my ramblings can help you do that, I'll be a happier painter.
Mind you, one of the "things" that brought me to Studio Artist is what it already had to offer many years ago, some of its automatic actions were rough, very rough, to be sure, but swam already in waters I could comfortably swim in and manually hone the roughness out.
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