The element of color is prevalent of every avenue of our lives. We make decisions on what to wear, what to buy, and what to observe based on the color we observe. Color can make one feel a certain way and have a personality of their own--for example, red exudes energy and confidence, yellow is warm and comforting, blue gives comfort and green is harmonious and natural as it is the most frequently occurring color in our outdoor environment.
Color depends heavily on the light that it is exposed to and therefore reflects to our receptor, the eye. For example, a shadow cast on the outside of the next-door dorm painted a creamy yellow-orange color. Even though the color cast by the shadow would actually be a warm grey color if I were to paint the scene, I still view the building as the same creamy yellow-orange color even though in reality it is not. This concept is called the concept of color constancy: a psychological compensation in which despite the visual physical evidence, we view the objects in the colors that we are accustomed to.
Claude Monet played with this concept of light in his color studies of poplar trees and haystacks. Painting the haystacks at different times during the day and seasons of the year, Monet studied the affect that light has on color, how it changes according to that light, and how even though hay is psychologically viewed as “yellow”, many different colors have to be taken into account to make it look real on a 2-dimensional space.
Pictures courtesy of: http://www.topofart.com/images/artists/Claude_Oscar_Monet/paintings/monet062.jpg and http://www.canvasreplicas.com/images/Haystack%20Thaw%20Claude%20Monet.jpg
No comments:
Post a Comment