Private Story
Vision: Brightness and Color
Vision: Brightness and Color
(2019- )
Our vision system – eye plus brain – processes color through different pathways than it does brightness. This is something that abstract painters have explored -- if the colors in a painting have the same luminescence, we lose such features as three-dimensionality, object identification and figure/ground separation. I suspect, too, that this partly explains the classical painting technique known as grisaille, in which a scene was first laid down on the canvas using only shades of grey, and then repainted with translucent colors.
These images play with the different processing of color and brightness by inverting the brightness of digital images without changing their colors. Some of the images look almost realistic, with only a hint that something is not quite as it should be; some resemble the uncanny work of infrared photographers; some become intriguingly abstract. In a few of the images I have begin to expose the process , by showing both the original and the transformation in the same image.
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