Abandoning Our Values

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Still Life with Bottles Paul Cezanne

What makes an object look three dimensional?

We use a variety of cues to give us this information: light and shadow, contrast, pattern, color, texture, scale, temperature and value, usually in combinations. Our ability to measure these different parameters and make a decision about the dimensionality and location of something in our field of vision is automatic and immediate - a product of millions of years of evolving visual sophistication. Most people do not have to think much about visual perception, but as artists, it is useful to investigate.

In drawing, we learn to create the illusion of form with value changes (light to dark), or chiaroscuro, using all the subtle changes in tone from black to the white of the paper. Having gained proficiency at chiaroscuro work, we quite naturally adapt our knowledge of values to our color work. But the world of colors is not just value-driven, it has an equal partner in …