Emil Joseph Robinson; the Science of Light

Yesterday I talked about how Carlos San Millan paints the effect of light so beautifully, and posted work by a painter he recommended: Emil Joseph Robinson. Today I’d like to make some points about one of his paintings, and how he has applied ideas of contrast to paint the effects of light.

Take a look at the glowing object in the painting above. Even though it’s just a little object, and has no light colors in it, it appears emanate light. Lets see what makes it glow.

When we look at the glowing object, what we see immediately is red. Red on it’s own doesn’t glow. I zoomed into the picture and took a screenshot of the color. Here’s that section of the painting, in a big color block – exactly the same color as the glowing thing.

The color is a pretty bold orange-red. It’s loud and eye catching. It pops right off the screen here, but it doesn’t glow. In fact, when just sitting there between these paragraphs of texts, it looks a bit darker than what’s in the painting, but it’s the same color. I got it right from a screen shot after zooming in on the painting. So why does the object in the painting look so luminous? The trick is that colors are never in isolation, they’re always in relationship to what’s around them. Let’s break the colors in the painting down to see how it’s working.

“You can get light from any kind of contrast: soft / hard edges, muted / saturated colors, dark / light value, cold / warm hues. Using contrast is much better than pushing the light values to the highest level.”

– Carlos San Millan

Light can be shown by:

Hard edges vs soft edges. The painting has a balanced mix of hard and soft edges. The glowing object has hard edges.

Saturated vs muted colors. The painting is almost entirely muted colors. The glowing object is a saturated high chroma warm light red.

Light vs dark value. The painting is almost entirely dark values. The glowing object, while not a light value, is the brightest value in the painting by one step. The color on the left wall looks similar, so I’ve cut out the glowing object and placed it above the left wall, so we can compare colors. It’s a lighter value by quite a bit.

In addition, the values of the colors around the object are all several steps darker on the value scale.

Warm vs cold hues, and complimentary colors. The painting is red/green complementary colors. The glowing object is surrounded by red-green mixes, including it’s own shading in a green-red mix, and the brightest part of red is next to green.

There is one more detail I’d like to point out. On the back of the chair is a thin vertical line that vibrates with light. Notice how it is green next to red (complementary contrast), surrounded by black (value contrast), surrounded by muted colors (chroma contrast). Science.