“The creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely”.

Joseph Albers

Preface

This essay is written to accompany and attempt to contextually explain the digital prints on this website www.lughfineart.net.  It is a personal organization of my interests in the relation of visual art to perceptual psychology and color science, (and vice-versa) and an attempt to apply those interests using contemporary digital media. It is not intended to be the definitive word on the topics that it briefly outlines. It is a work in progress, and while it has taken some time to compile, there are gaps and omissions intended to be filled in as encountered in response to critical response.

As of this date it has already been suggested that I compile a glossary of terminology to differentiate them based on their origin in science or visual art.

Each of the artists, scientists and traditions cited in this essay had an impact on visual art, so this essay is an ode to their contribution. But, in turn, there is a recognition of limits in the choices that people make, some self-imposed, others imposed by the technology of the day when they were produced. One thing can’t be another, so the limits of technology limited their choices as much as my own. 

Recognizing that Escher’s lifetime was concurrent with developments in color theory which didn’t seem to have been used by him is just such an example. I became interested in applying the color theory of Albers and others to contemporary software tools and digital printing media to the patterns that Escher was inspired by and perpetuated. Though sometimes mildly grotesque, the color in Escher’s polychromatic prints was, for the most part, ornamental and non-symbolic. Recognizing this fact, it’s possible to ask what would happen if a principle like simultaneous contrast were to be applied to the Moresque tiling that was used by Escher. Simultaneous contrast, a perceptual illusion, has been recognized since the renaissance, and very likely before that.

The discovery and explanation of simultaneous contrast has been alternately attributed to Da Vinci, Goethe, or E.M. Chevreul—who introduced the term in a paper that was to influence the Impressionists and other art movements of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It is one of the abstract perceptual principles of color so carefully explored and systematized in Albers’s The Interaction of Color. It might have introduced a perceptually atmospheric dimension to Escher’s images. 

Also, the gradient color tools in contemporary software, that echo the Renaissance technique of crosshatching, now make it possible to make imperceptibly smooth continuous-tone complementary color inversions that could only have been imagined by Victor Vasarely, a painter and printmaker whose images and illusions are akin to the paradoxical narratives of Escher.    

In the digital age, where everything is impacted by the encroachment of technology, everyone has to be able to see the technical in the aesthetic—and vice-versa.  I’m not a scientist, so, a consequence of the context of this essay will no doubt be that some won’t find it thorough enough, while others may find it too technical and unartistic. My answer is to apologize to both groups. I’ve never proven anything, but I may have gotten some things to work. 

I do love the beauty in order, but things don’t have to be orderly to be beautiful. I do remember a painting teacher of mine saying… there’s nothing more boring than chaos.   

I’ve intentionally excluded stereoptic diagrams, with their accompanying glasses, and holograms, which are a more of a physical, than physiological technology. These fascinating highly aesthetic and technical inventions, which contain the same need to see three-dimensional spatial depth within the limits two-dimensions, are characteristically very similar to work that I will explore. Fractals patterns, the ultimate explanation for why the silhouette of every natural thing looks the way it does, are contingent on what this essay is about, but better left for a genuine specialist to explain.

I apologize many times over, because their exclusion is for the sake of economy and time. 

The “schematic” diagrams that are part of the work that I’m comparing in this essay, contain similar organizational approaches to the analysis of spatial illusion. Looking at a random-dot autostereoptic diagram, or artwork by Albers, or Escher, for example, our eyes move left and right, up and down, in response to a scheme comparing how space behaves, its depth or shallowness, convexity or concavity. It is the analytical structure of these diagrams in art and science that are very intriguing.   

There is a philological lineage traceable to Moresque and Renaissance tiling patterns that influenced the 20^th century art of M.C Escher, and that these themes contain a soup of the aesthetic, mathematical, and scientific ideas that may be unique to the world of vision. 

I am using the Moresque era as a starting point for reference and comparison, recognizing that… 

1. 13^th century Moresque patterns are themselves the culmination of an already highly sophisticated tradition in Arabic art and mathematics that very likely have their roots in weaving, tapestry and  domestic decorative arts.
2. The core of this essay is the art of M.C. Escher, whose work was directly influenced by Moresque tiling motifs, and seems to be uniquely situated for easy comparison with antecedent, contemporaneous, and subsequently generations of artistic, mathematical and perceptual study.
3. Escher’s work was also central to the thesis of Douglas Hofstaetder’s influential book Goedel, Escher, Bach. In it symmetry and asymmetry are analyzed in cross-disciplinary form, so that also seemed to make a worthwhile synergistic connection— for unity and digression’s sake.

Perceptually oriented mid 20^th century artists…Albers, Anuszhkiewicz, Riley, Duchamp, Vasarely, Reinhardt and Johns, to name a few, were aware of perceptual psychology and it was part of their vocabulary as surely as paint, canvas, and glaze.  Albers himself was an educator, evangelizer and disseminator of its role in art.

Recent developments in random-dot autostereoptic visualization, that  have been the outcome of the work of Bela Julesz,  contain an unmistakable resemblance to an Escher or Moresque tiled subdivision of space, and by inference, the ancient human fascination with and desire to understand how pattern is affected by perception. 

Finally, the behavior in these patterns created over millennia, have a daydream-like static equilibrium.  Looking at a tiled image, and gradually adapting to its chromatic and spatially illusory anomalies, their color opposition produces what early 20th century camouflage artists called “dazzle”. In the brief few time that we look at these colored patterns— and adapt to an illusion— we are alone, save for the seeming infinity of our finite sense of sight.

“In the brief time that we look at these colored patterns—and adapt to an illusion— we are alone, save for the seeming infinity of our finite sense of sight.”

Moresque Tiling Patterns, the Art of M.C. Escher, and 20^th cen. Color theory

“We adore chaos because we love to produce order”

M.C. Escher

Mauritius Escher, http://www.mcescher.com/ was influenced by the Moresque tiling patterns at Alhambra, a fortress and palace dating from mid 13^th cen. Spain: http://www.spsu.edu/math/tile/grammar/moor.htm, and the northern European printmaking tradition from dating from the German Renaissance of Durer, Rembrandt and 20th century sources.  The optical limitation of Moresque tiling, however, is that its color is arrayed in relatively small, somewhat linear areas of interlocking polychromatic color distribution. So Moresque tiling behaves somewhat similarly to the adjacently colored dots in impressionist paintings— additively blending to produce a third color, and, thus, figure and ground coalesce, but remain consistent and unambiguous. The color palette of the tiles is limited to the available pigments and glazes of North Africa, Spain and the Middle East. 

In the Moresque patterns of the Alhambra there is a clear, consistent discrimination between foreground and background. A viewer’s eyes move through the designs endlessly, astonished by the seemingly infinite polychromatic division of areas of color. This perceptual effect is amplified by their pure complex polygonal mathematical abstraction.

In Escher’s prints, the geometry is appropriated to illustrating paradoxical mathematical narratives, and the cartoon depictions of bestiary, or medieval villagers, buildings, and panorama etc., are each influenced by one art historical precedent or another—woodcuts, engravings and stained glass for example. Their connection to traditional European printmaking is overt, sometimes grotesque, and always graphically adroit. Their color organization is ornamental, and it was, limited by the lithographic palette of its day. The self-interaction of color along the boundaries of the the polygons is limited by being confined within the black silhouetted outline similar to games used in stained glass window tiling. Given the limitations of stone registration in lithography, the color choices Escher made are understandable. 

Contemporaneous with Escher’s work were developments in the color theories of Wilhelm Ostwald, Albert Munsell, Hermann von Helmholtz and others, each with their own contribution to the science of color perception and its systematization. The theme of simultaneous contrast, where adjacent colors modify each other’s appearance was introduced around this time.  

The optical experimentation of Marcel Duchamp represented a thematic synthesis of kinetics and perceptual psychology in art. Duchamp’s work was concurrent with Escher’s lifetime, and subsequently influenced what became the physiological art of the mid 20^th century. 

Joseph Albers and Johannes Itten, instructors in color theory at the Bauhaus, explained color behavior as a series of disambiguated contrasts. Albers’ paintings employed primary geometric themes and motifs that contained a kind of “analytical classicism”.  Ad Reinhardt, whose work evolved to employ austere physiological means, and spare geometry, contained a combination of both light/dark adaptation and chromatic adaptation… situations where the viewer has to take the time for the color and light receptors in the eye to adjust to the combination of ambient illumination and the minute chromatic differences employed in the paintings. In Jasper Johns’ American flag paintings, where the red, white, and blue are painted in their complements green, black and orange, a viewer sees the “true” colors of the flag by Johns’ use of successive contrast. The list of the perceptually- oriented artists is long, and they practiced simultaneously and influenced other genres of the same era.   

Camouflage and Redundancy in Visual Equilibrium

In camouflage, a pattern is created where a disguised entity is momentarily undifferentiated from or ambiquously situated in its environment. But, no camouflage is perfect… and, in time, a viewer sees what it disguised. For humans, trichromats… people who see color in three dimensions… camouflage must exist in three dimensions of color.  In my own prints, in order to concentrate on color vision itself, I’ve avoided the depiction of objects... the disguised things that rely on camouflage. Figure and ground are one, and they exchange their role depending on context. There was a fascinating demonstration by Bela Julesz, a 20^th century perceptual researcher in which an object resembling an egg container is illuminated from the top so the container appears concave as it ought to. But, when the orientation of the light is changed, the same concave containers look to be convex. It’s a very arresting optical illusion. The illusions in my digital prints took some inspiration from Julesz’s demonstration.

These images are about the “seemingly” static temporal aspects of vision, so they aren’t animated, and their spatial ambiguity is achieved by simplifying and refining visual activity to some of its most basic components… the simplest left-right/ up-down movements of the eyes, seeing color in controlled lighting, seeing in color and sequential comparison, and attributes of autostereopsis... the false perception of depth with binocularly focused vision of two-dimensional space.

To keep these themes manageable, the pattern distribution is in rough equilibrium. In the prints the figure/ground distribution ranges from 35/65% 40/60%, 50/50%. The term figure in figure/ground refers to what would normally be the camouflaged object differentiated from its environment… the ground.

The condition of equilibrium is a haptic adaptive anomaly because the majority of visible things, and the environments that they are seen in, are made up of proportions that aren’t in equilibrium, this fact is due to the effect of the fractal nature of chemistry. Our retino-cortical system perceives space and color and has evolved to respond to somewhat random conditions of illumination and distribution of objects. 

The perceived area of figure/ground is in the prints is reversed using colors that are HSB (hue, saturation, & brightness) values that work like the Munsell color system. In this system, I used complementary hues… colors on opposing sides of the Munsell sphere, and that yield achromatic gray in 50/50 percent admixture…the combining different colors of light. Saturation in the HSB system is color purity, so I used colors of roughly equivalent purity and brightness. The HSB system is available in conventional RGB (red, blue, & green) transmitted light color software palettes. In Johannes Itten’s book The Art of Color, the behavior of color is analyzed as a series of disambiguated contrasts, these can be applied to my prints as contrasts of extent (the ratio of distribution of one color to another), complements, lightness and darkness. In Joseph Albers’ book The Interaction of Color, this type of color equilibrium produces simultaneous contrast, a kind of mutual repulsion…colors optically forcing themselves to the front of the picture plane.

“Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon--- it is the very heart of painting.” Joseph Albers

The redundant equilibrium of the distribution of area, chromatic intensity and value— darkness in the prints are the components that produce the intense visual impact that is akin to the generation of the static ambiguous response in camouflage behavior.

When the images are printed, the RGB color system is interpreted in CMYK… yellow, magenta, cyan, & black gamut of the laser printer, where the subtractive… pigment mixture results in black.  

The polygonal, sometimes tessellated, interlocking patterns in my prints were used because of their two-and-fourfold symmetrical “efficiency”.   To keep the shapes clean I avoided using arabesque, curvilinear, or organic patterns to minimize anti-aliasing…the blurring of pixels along shape boundaries in computer images.  

The upper left corner of some of these images usually looks like the foreground of the pattern. The diagonally opposite corner usually looks like the background. The “atmospheric” color gradient threshold that crosses the picture at a right angle, where the pixellated foreground and background are ambiguous, creates something resembling a false “autostereoptic” depth to the pattern. My assumption is that this behavior is directly related to the Julesz demonstration previously mentioned.

The upper left corner of the image almost always appears to be the source of light in the illusion, and may ultimately be why we see depth in the illusion.  The seeming direction of light is also related to countershading…the negation of incident light with reverse coloration in the animal kingdom…another nearly universal issue in camouflage due to the ubiquitous presence of light in a world of phototropes. Interestingly I see a similarity to the way in which  countershading and crosshatching behave. In crosshatching, a successive array of lines is drawn at an axis that is perpendicular to the direction of incident light to achieve a volumetric effect. In countershading, nature has evolutionarily evolved a technique where, in order to disguise the existence of volume, perpendicular to the direction of incident light, a pattern neutralizes the light by darkening the highlighted area of an object and brightening the shaded area of the object.  

Notes:

Comparison of the autostereoptic schematic attributes of Escher, Albers, Julesz… the image is split in half, the left and right of the picture are compared with each other and subsequently synthesized into a larger perceptual whole.
In the case of Escher, the geometry of the picture would eventually contribute to the spatial characteristics of autostereoptic imagery. In the case of Albers, the “noise” of simultaneous contrast is akin to the random dot noise in a Julesz diagram.

Munsell helped to create systems to explain both an additive (mixture of light to produce color) and a subtractive (mixture of pigment) to explain the roles of each in vision. 

Vasarely’s depiction of spatial paradox is very closely akin to that of Escher. The difference is that Vasarely’s work contains no iconography at all.

Simultaneous contrast is perfectly explained physically on the NASA color website, but it doesn’t explain how it behaves physiologically. I haven’t yet been able to find a good source for a historical explanation. Eye and Brain probably contains an explanation for how it works physiologically.