Welcome to
The Painting Lesson
by Linda Carson
big black pig studio
98 King St. N., Waterloo Ontario Canada
www.bigblackpig.com
Local Colour
Sometimes painters don't paint apples red. Sometimes, by firelight, a white carpet looks golden yellow. That's when painters start muttering about "local colour," as opposed to the colour something appears to be, or the colour they've chosen to paint it. When painters talk about the local colour of something, they mean what anyone else would think of as "the colour it really is."
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For example: The flower I studied to make this painting wasn't orange. Its local colour was white. I blithely ignored that because I liked the orange against the raw beige surface of the unpainted panel. |
Once you start thinking of colour as a unique consequence of both the light-reflecting qualities of the object and the wavelengths of light that illuminate it (see the gory technical details of colour and light), the whole idea of "local colour" becomes a little suspect. Is there any such thing?
Back to the main lesson?Art & Text (C) Linda Carson 2002
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