This week, my research took me in a slightly different direction. After my contemporary art presentation, I realized that 2 out of the 3 artists I selected were focused on the concept of color perception. This topic is really interesting to me so I wanted to explore it further. The first example I found it Monet's haystack series (shown above). Monet, like most impressionists, was really interested in the way we perceive color. In this series, he painted the same haystack in different seasons and times of day to show how our perception of the local color (the actual color of the haystack) is entirely dependent on the light that's being shown on it (optical color). You can see how much the color of the haystack changes. Another thing that Monet and other impressionists were interested in was optical color mixing. What I mean by that is they would lay down small brushstrokes of color next to each other instead of mixing it and then applying it to the canvas. For example, instead of mixing an orange, they might put yellow and red next to each other and let the eye of the viewer mix the color.
My second example is Joseph Albers and his color experiments. On the image above, the 2 brown squares are the same exact color, yet we perceive the one on the left to be darker than the one on the right. This is because of how subjective colors are and they change depending on the surrounding context or colors.
I'm not sure how I want to incorporate this into my midterm because there's so many aspects to how we see color but I think it's very interesting and it is a topic that has been explored by many artists in the past so I think I want to stick with this topic in for my midterm.