Anyone else think this article is a plug for his app?
The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light
61–68 of 68 posts
Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light
#62I suspect that this whole exercise is moot. However one adjusts their color spectrum, I'm still staring at tiny digital reproductions of paintings on a fairly cheap LCD monitor. One of the things I've learned by reading a book on art, and then wandering around various art museums looking at the very art that was pictured in the book, is that paint is different from ink or pixels . You can look at a poster print of a…
This is moot for another reason.
Your eyes take in the full spectrum of color and produce 3 scalar values for red, green, and blue.
One can take a work of art, illuminate it with pure white light (containing all colors, not just red, green, and blue), determine these RGB values that your eyes will experience, and store them in an image file. You can takes this file and reproduce the work on a computer monitor, on a printer, etc. It will look the same as the work of art under white light.
As soon as you illuminate the work of art with different light, all bets are off. The RGB values do not contain enough information to determine what the work of art would look like under arbitrary spectrum.
For extreme examples consider the following effects:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorescence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridescence
Conclusion: illuminating a reproduction under different light, or processing a reproduction (an image file) in a computer, will not necessarily give you an accurate representation of what the original would look like. We need more information to know if what they saw in that light room is actually what the original would look like under that light. The same goes for the examples on the page.
Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light
#63What I noticed: In each version, my focus is drawn to completely different locations. - In The Harvest, I immediately look to the farmer in the newer version. - In Starry Night, I immediately look to the church in the new version, instead of the moon. - Likewise, in The Road Menders and The Sower I look at the people more, and the trees and sun less. - In the Cafe Terrace at Night, I immediately look to the server in…
Maybe I am a little color blind and never knew it- because while I can see a difference between the two, it's not all that striking- the only difference I see is that oranges become yellows and deep blues become a little lighter. Am I the only one?
Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light
#64I suspect that this whole exercise is moot. However one adjusts their color spectrum, I'm still staring at tiny digital reproductions of paintings on a fairly cheap LCD monitor. One of the things I've learned by reading a book on art, and then wandering around various art museums looking at the very art that was pictured in the book, is that paint is different from ink or pixels . You can look at a poster print of a…
A great example of this for me was that modern art painting that is just a specific shade of purple or violet (I forget the name, might be "shade #456" or something). It would look like total BS on paper, but displayed in the gallery it had this very strange effect, like a black hole, or weird dead zone, a matte presence that was a distinct experience.
This is precisely right. And a great deal of modernist work is just like this... for reasons that may be obvious if you think about them: In a world with ubiquitous photography, the details that don't show up in photos are even more special, and art galleries have the time and space to focus on them.
Those paintings that seem to consist of just one black line on a field of white? They make sense in person. (Hint: Just because it's notionally a field of white doesn't mean it isn't made of seventy-five overlapping layers of slightly different shades of white paint. Just because it's notionally a black line doesn't mean the line is uniform.)
Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light
#65What I noticed: In each version, my focus is drawn to completely different locations. - In The Harvest, I immediately look to the farmer in the newer version. - In Starry Night, I immediately look to the church in the new version, instead of the moon. - Likewise, in The Road Menders and The Sower I look at the people more, and the trees and sun less. - In the Cafe Terrace at Night, I immediately look to the server in…
Maybe I am a little color blind and never knew it- because while I can see a difference between the two, it's not all that striking- the only difference I see is that oranges become yellows and deep blues become a little lighter. Am I the only one?
Something to keep in mind: the gamut of your LCD is a pretty crude mapping of the actual paint colors.
In the best case, on a wide gamut panel, these are very rude approximations of what you might see under the unnatural lighting experienced by the author. It should not be taken as any kind of diagnostic.
If you have e.g. a 6 bit TN panel, all of these are going to look very similar, before anomalous vision is even involved.
Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light
#66With the exception of the last example, the two versions of each painting look identical to me. Of course, I am looking at them through a 4+NS cataract, in an eye (the only one I have) that also has a damaged macula and other significant retina damage - but I suspect the cataract plays a bigger role.
I'm having said cataract removed this Friday, so I'll have to check this again next week and see how things have changed. I'm very curious to see what the difference will be. The progressive worsening of my vision over the past year has been so gradual that it's sometimes hard to quantify just how much things like my ability to see color and contrast has changed.
Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light
#67This is such a bizarre exercise, albeit interesting in terms of trivia, i guess.
"""Finally I feel that van Gogh’s astounding qualities are available to me."""
I've often felt that nerds (including myself here) shouldn't be allowed near artistically expressive mediums and equipment, such as cameras, because we nerd them up way too much and miss the whole point. And this quote just sums up what i mean. :S A minuscule colour shift reveals Van Gogh's genius? NOPE.
Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oil paintings aren't painted in a single go. There's a lot of layering involved. So perhaps a better question is, how would you mix the same color twice, if you couldn't tell a range of colors apart?
This is what makes me question the colour blind theory. Although they are very strong in places, the colours all work together. If he was colour blind surely there would be patches of green and patches of non-green instead of smooth colour. How could he possibly match the same colours over and over again each time he mixed his paints if he couldn't tell the difference?
I thought about this for a while.
I'm not an expert in oil painting technique, but I think one possibility is, you tend to overpaint an area at a time. So: mix some paint, layer up part of the canvas. Come back later, mix some paint, do it again.
If that's how it works it would explain a bunch of things in the comparison images. Like: how come the bridge is yellow, but its reflection in the river is bright green? Maybe they were painted at different times.