|
You remember--“Keep your crayons inside the lines,” they told you, and even if you went outside the lines, the color from the crayon still complemented the drawing.
This new way of painting is entirely opposite because
the drawing complements the crayon. In Contraire the black drawing functions just as that crayon did by coloring in something--but instead of coloring in the lines, the opposite thing happens in Contraire--the lines color in the color. Therefore the color is no longer color. It has the same function as the drawing would in an ordinary painting. And the drawing is no longer the drawing: The drawing becomes the color.
This is the second change ever of a basic element of art--bigger than the one created by Claude Monet, who, by painting with little bits of color, de-emphasized the elements of object and detail and created a revolution in the late 19th century.
Contraire changes the object/color relationship.
A silhouette picture has a similar effect. Contraire takes that to its ultimate conclusion.
|
Aristotle had it right when he said that all colors were nothing more than various mixtures of black and white, and compared the colors to flavors. People threw his explanation in the trash when they discovered prisms.
I agree with Aristotle, and color is only a perception anyway. It's how we perceive waves of energy of various wavelengths. It seems obvious to me that the only thing common to all colors and all shades of colors is that all of them contain various degrees of white or black, making them lighter or darker. And today, when color is pictured as a shape, white and black are at the ends with the colors in the middle, the colors getting lighter or darker depending on how close to the ends they are (how much white or black they are mixed with).
Colors are just flavors of black and white. The principles of Contraire support Aristotle's original statement.
I have named this new way of painting Contraire--the French word for opposite. All other styles of painting can be painted using this new way.
Cary Kent
|