Optical Mixing

Earlier in the week in my colour in context class I gave a presentation on colour interaction, and though the Colour textbook states some amazing information on how our eyes perceive colour (p55-65) I thought I'd zone in on one very interesting aspect of colour interaction known as "Optical Mixing". The painting technique known as Pointillism, which was developped by the French artist Georges Seurat, is a perfect example of the phenomenon. Optical mixing occurs when two different colours are placed beside each other, and on a grand scale such as a huge pointillism piece, the effect is all the more greater. What occurs is that when our eyes sees two colours applied in separate dots all around each other, though the colours aren't mixed physically, our eye mixes them up for us. So, for example if we see a pointillism picture of a tree with bark that is painted with red and green dots, then our eye will 'mix' the red and green and we will see brown basically. The interesting part about all this is that the effect of optical mixing produces colours that are more vibrant - so the brown that we see from our eyes optically mixing the red and green dots will appear more vibrant and interesting than if the brown was physically created on a pallette by mixing red and green paint. It's fun to look at pointillism pieces and see this in action so above is George Seurat's "Bridge at Courbevoie" 1886-7. His pieces often took a couple of years to make, and the point of the art form is to let none of the dots bleed into the image, but for them all to be seprarate and your eyes do the rest :)

-Lauren