oil on hand-stretched linen
13” x 15”
2023
Research grant:
The Exploration of Color Theory’s Psychological Effects on the Viewer
I was awarded a Federal Grant in 2023 for my research project in which I executed a series of landscape paintings that explore color theory. I investigated color interactions, color variances due to time of day, and observation of natural colors within the landscape. Through this research and experimentation, I have a greater understanding of how color psychologically affects the viewer and how to apply this knowledge within my future work.
I rabbit skin glued and oil primed four linen canvas for this research project. Each canvas was painted with direct observation at different time frames during the day. There was a canvas for the morning, noontime, afternoon, and evening hours. The colors I mixed with each canvas when observing the scenery varied depending on the time frame for the canvas. The morning and noon canvases have brighter colors and less shadows in comparison to the afternoon and evening canvases. It’s important as a painter to set a specific period of two to three hours during the day for a landscape painting. This ensures that the colors that are mixed are cohesive with the landscape motif due to the change in color that's seen in just a couple of hours. Experimenting with time frames in this project gave me first-hand experience on the colors that can generally be expected with changing light, and how these variations in color can affect the aura of the image. Having personal experience with this concept gave me an immense amount of knowledge that greatly enhanced other forms of research.
