The White Point Project

Experiments at the Limits of Color

A few years ago, while exchanging with a close friend on the subjects of color science, color spaces, and color models, gamuts, etc., I decided that I would start a new painting project called “The White Point Project”.

The basic idea was to do actual physical experiments in color theory / color science. As a painter, I already had my own painterly “language” for speaking of “color”. Now I was beginning to be equipped with ANOTHER language, let’s call it the “printer’s” language of color.

My main objective at the time was to study what happened when I would paint a canvas in a color that was what I call “infinitesimally offwhite”. That is to say, I would take basic Titanium white, let’s say, and I would add an infinitesimal amount of yellow, or pink, or blue, and then paint a canvas with that color. I then let the canvases dry and studied them under various different lighting conditions.

What I ended up realizing was that Daylight has an effect on the colors in objects and in the environment. Depending on the time of day and the time of year, as well as the geographical position, the effects of Daylight were always different, and always changing.

I already knew, mostly intuitively, but also intellectually, that painters such as Monet and the other Impressionists, had already studied the “effects of light”. In fact, I came to realize that Painting itself was more or less just a “study of the effects of light”. And so I knew that I was going in the right direction, because this research was in accord with what I had learned as a classically trained painter and amateur art theorist / art historian.

Here is a simple example of something that I recently learned. On the right is a picture taken from a digital camera, untouched. The section of the overall image that I chose is a small section of a subject relatively far away, so it’s normal that it is somewhat “out of focus”. The trick, though, is that in the image you see on the left, I added a color that happens to be one of the colors from the “daylight series” (to be explained). The effect is that it has a “warmer” look & feel to it. I will explain why this is so later on.

The image on the left is “warmer” due to a “daylight” hue added to it.

In painting, one often speaks of “warm” colors vs. “cool” colors. This is kind of a misnomer, because when one actually looks at the science of “color temperature” it is almost the reverse that is true. But the “painterly language” is many centuries old, and is quite useful.

For example, given two different hues of “grey”, one can ask the simple question: Which “grey” seems “warmer” to you? Which seems “cooler”? I hope to look at what this phenomenon is exactly and why “things are so”.

Which of these greys is “warmer”? Which is “cooler”? (One has 6% yellow, the other 6% blue added)

Essentially, “color” is not exactly some characteristic of the physical world, of the physical, and ambient, environment. Color is more or less something that “happens in the brain”. That is not to say that there isn’t something actually physically going on, for there really is. But the overall effects, in the end, are mostly phenomena having to do with complex judgements made by our very brains. There is no other way to talk about color other than in this way.

The light of day, the actual beams of sunlight, what we call “Daylight”, actually has its own “color” if you will. What happens is that when the “colored Daylight” hits objects on earth, objects in the world, the daylight is “subtracted” if you will, from the color of the actual objects.

The colors of Daylight change depending on the time of day, on the time of year, and on the geographical location, as well as the general meteorological conditions, whether there are clouds or not, what the level of humidity is, etc. etc. Therefore, Daylight is always changing. And as was said above, the effects of daylight, and the changes in the color of daylight, on the objects in the environment, is definitely non-trivial.

Surely, the effects of daylight can be very “subtle” but they are non-trivial as well as non-negligible, as we will hopefully see.

For now, we will leave it at that. I will be writing some more articles on this subject. Let’s just recall that this is all under the “umbrella” of an art project, a series of experiments and works of art, that I am calling codename “The White Point Project”. Hope that you will enjoy these philosophical investigations. Hope you are well. Take care and keep in touch.

Sincerely,

A.G. (c) 2016