Transparency - A Key to Spatial Depth in Painting: Part 1, Black/White


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Mini-Tutorial: Transparency - A Key to Spatial Depth in Painting: Part 1, Black/White

by Michael Newberry

NOTE FROM MSK: The actual tutorial has been removed at the request of Michael Newberry. The link to the tutorial on his site remains in the title above. I highly recommend you go there and go through it. Here is a small quote from it:

Monet, The Corniche of Monaco, 1884,

Oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 37 in. (75 x 94 cm)

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

www.artchive.com

This online tutorial is a transcription from a 2002 lecture I gave at the Courage of Your Perceptions Conference (Satellite to the EC's Vision Scientists' Conference) in Glasgow, Scotland.

We have examples of artworks from 30,000 years ago to the present in which artists have worked with spatial depth in their drawings and paintings. I have been fascinated by this phenomenon and, for years, I have asked myself how did these artists achieve these startling effects. The result of my query is the formulation of the concept that:

Given a two-dimensional surface, transparency and contrast are the means to place forms in spatial depth.

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