I had an epiphany this morning. It occurred in the shower while I was trying to
figure out how to explain to my kids the principal of optical mixing. I drifted
into normal color mixing when it suddenly hit me that all mixing is optical
mixing! Paint is medium with microscopic granules of pigment suspended in it.
When you mix two paints, the granules of pigment optically mix, and you get
another the secondary color. Now there are probably several of you saying so
what. The point here is that optical mixing has been treated for years as
something completely different from normal mixing with paints. In fact, the only
difference between optical mixing using little dots of color, and optical mixing
by using microscopic granules of pigment is the resolution of the image.
Traditional optical mixing is simply a low-resolution picture. So I have to ask
what was the point (if you'll forgive the pun) of Seurat? If you are already
optically mixing with paints, why try to do it using big (relatively speaking)
dots.
(Yes, I know that the principle of optical mixing had just been discovered, and
Seurat was showing off his technical knowledge.)
I can see now that having art students create a secondary color by optically
mixing dots of primary colors is a good tool to teach color mixing in paints.
Once a student understands the principle they should be better able to mix the
colors they really want from a six-color palette. Other than this, I can't see
that optical mixing as a technique is useful. After all, it's all optically
mixed just at a very high resolution.
Why is it that many of the techniques of Modern art are really just glorified
student exercise?
