Back to New Nature: A New Dialogue between Light and Color
A New Color Theory by Jian Guo Xu
Light and the myriad of colors it contains is the fundamental basis upon which all of our visual experience, art, is built. Yet light, since the latter years of the nineteenth Century, mankind experience of light, the source of color theory through the history of western art, has profoundly changed.
The emotional universe of man has deep roots in his/her sensation of the physical world. These senses are thus h2ly yet subtly shaped by the presence, or absence, of light and by extension colors. However in our contemporary world, few continue to solely follow the ebbs and flow of natural light. We defy the darkness of night and even the brightness of the day with our technology. No longer does the artist paint, or the reader read, or the worker work, by natural light. Most of the light we experience and see is not beamed from the sun, but from the vast array of bulbs, tubes, and filaments that bombard our senses and restructure our emotions, just as the h2 light of the sun and pale glow of the moon had done for much of man’s history.
To speak of “light” in modernity is to speak of two identities; light no longer belongs simply to its natural, organic self but must also share that space with its artificial and inorganic sibling, a sibling of our creation that increasingly dominates our daily existence.
Take a walk down Times Square and one is immediately impressed by the synthetic light that envelops your senses and alters your perceptions. Gaze at the blazing red, green and blue neon and the halogen bulbs that brightly light shops; you realize that unlike nature’s light, these artificial lights do not act as the source illuminating the object. Rather, artificial light is emitted by the object itself. It is in effect, a mini-sun and moon; yet unlike these distant celestial bodies, which give us color that has traversed space, altered by the ozone, to illuminate our world as a whole, our man-made lights only create an inorganic light. Thus, while the blue of the sky is a result of solar ray diffusion in our atmosphere, it is infinitely organic, constantly and subtly shifting with varying atmospheric conditions, the same blue captured by the light of the computer screen is inorganic; its changes are result of a computer code that do not interact with the very objects it illuminates.
The environment of our daily lives has been so altered by our artificial constructs of frenzied information transmitted by equally frantic lights and colors that we live as virtual prisoners in a “nature” of our own making. In this new environment, the artificial lights and colors that surround us are the defining signs of our contemporary culture and identity. They subtly shape our consciousness by altering visual sensations, creating a “new nature” that is inorganic and unnatural. My work attempts to capture and redefine the “nature” of our modern experience by portraying the new lights and colors behind the veneer of artificial light which govern our lives. “Back to “Nature”” is a thus a movement that asks the artist and viewer to reexamine the meaning of “nature” through the prism of lights and colors that we have created.
The context of “Back to “Nature”” is a radical departure from the past simply because today’s “nature” is often illuminated by man-made lights; it’s an experience beyond the imagination of all previous color/light art movements. The Impressionists were the first to portray the interplay between light and color. However, as the name implies, they were artists of first impressions and first impressions as they exist in a “natural” nature.
It would be impossible for the Impressionists to conceive of light and color beyond the “natural” experience. Fauvists, a short movement following the Impressionists, sought to debunk Impressionist theories of light and color but ultimately failed because they too, can not experience and therefore can not portray light beyond the negation of its “natural” contexts. In our contemporary world, the importance of the visual experience may have remained the same, but its nature changed.
Seeing Red:
What you see and how you see is a visual epistemological question of how do we know what we see. The relationship between light and color is a complex process that interacts with the viewer and transforms over time. Seeing of a color is not a static process: initial perceptions of colors can shift radically as time passes. Unlike what most art critics and artists contend, the visual path of colors does not end after the first glance. Rather, color and light interact not only on a three-dimensional plane, but in a fourth dimension, time. The color we see not only shifts with every new visual focus but undergoes a metamorphosis with each passing second as well.
The seeing of color is much like the viewing of a transparency which gradually shifts to yield a negative of the original. For example: when we first see a red light, the edges are fringed by green; the red center appears to be light while the fringes dark. Yet when viewed at a fixed focal point for a few seconds, we see an inverse relationship occurring: the center becomes dark while the edge becomes light. The center red changes from orange to orange-green and finally to dark purple while the edges metamorphoses from green to blue-purple to red purple and finally to light orange. But if we had blinked or changed our focus at any given time, the light would have returned to its initial light-red center with dark-green fringes.
If even within the space of a few seconds, the coloration of one light is transformed so radically, how then can we differentiate which coloration in this sequence of colors is the correct one? How do we know if what we paint is what our eyes truly see? Perhaps as Freud suggests, “true color exist only in our subconscious dreaming state.”
Light and the Human Psyche:
Artificial light is an integral but invasive medium of our contemporary lives. The pervasive commercialization of lights by those who understand the influence of light on the human psyche such as television and film producers, lighting designers, architects affect our daily activities. We begin our day watching images comprised of light emanating from our television, our drive to work is fraught with bright head lights from cars criss-crossing and flashing police sirens on the way to an emergency, during our working hours, our faces are light up by the glare of our computer monitors. Even after an exhausting day at work, we still check email or surf the internet for news before we fall asleep to the flickering synthetic light of late-night shows. On weekends, we shop at gigantic neon lit malls, engross ourselves in movies and eat at restaurants with "romantic" lighting.
With the proliferation and dominance of synthetic lighting, the dialogue between light and our psychological and emotional makeup changes as well. We are no longer free to exist external to this environment exploding with intense lights: the “natural nature” now exist more as the site where our mind and spirit can escape the tyranny of these inorganic lights.
The Nature of the “New Light”:
We can not envision our modern society without the synthetic lights help us form our experiences of our towns and cities. The colors and lights of nature which were so aptly portrayed by the Impressionists, are no longer valid connections with sensations of modern life. It is artificial lights, with its own unique colors and characteristics, which have greater relevance in the experience of modern society. In truth, this lighted world is a gleaming veneer which hides the intense isolation and loneliness of the modern man.
Why then, has the study of the effect of this new type of light coloration on a two dimensional surface been so neglected by the contemporary art world? It is time to examine once again the interplay between modern light with its unique, yet unexplored colors, and our contemporary environment.
Our consciousness is bombarded by a vast array of lights. When multi-light sources, each with its unique coloration and hue, shines upon a shape, they fragment the shape to areas or "spots" of color which must then be regrouped by the eye to create a cohesive object.
These multi-light sources vary in color and intensity which create tensions between colors (cold colors recede while warm colors push to the foreground); these tensions generate a sense of space and depth. Within a particular space, "color rings" (a natural phenomenon of light’s wave properties) emanating from many light sources are juxtaposed on top of each other to create new colors and textures. The sources of these color rings -- artificial lights -- themselves serve as "condensation" points in space. They provide focusing points of light with which space is held and structured. Only in this structured space (composed of multi-light sources) can the myriad of light rings mingle and coalesce into strange new colors, hues, and shapes. These new colors and hues do not exist in nature.
Another phenomenon that has not yet been explored is the way that artificial light contrasts soft and hard edges. The condensing points of light and the objects they demarcate form hard edges in between which, soft color rings "flow" freely. The relationships and contrasts discussed above are phenomena of our environment today for which new definitions must be developed.
Back to New Nature:
Light, the fundamental element of nature upon which all of Western has been based, has been reconstituted: it is no longer natural. In the brightly lit world of unnatural lights such as ours, traditional light and color theories can no longer be applied. The light of our contemporary existence is an alien, artificial light form created not by the distant sun or moon, but by man. Unlike the sun, which illuminates all objects on earth indiscriminately, this light of our manmade “nature” has its own characteristics that shines closely upon us and emits visual images that communicate with us. In essence, attempts to portray the oppressively lit world we dwell in, the artist must stare long and hard into the lights around us. Only through such process of visual inspection and emotional introspection can we create works which are at once familiar yet strangely bright and dreamlike.