Re: [Phys-l] experiments with dyes (was: happy equinox)

[Marty Weiss <martweiss@comcast.net>]

Renoir invented the portable pallette for use in the outdoors, along  
with paint *tubes*.  Up till then landscape painters had to carry  
ready made colors pre-mixed in their studios.  So, he must have known  
a lot about color mixing and while he probably did not *think* about  
primary colors, like an accomplished pianist does not *think* about  
*how* to hit the chords on the written score, and race car drivers do  
not have to *think& about the gears in their trtansmission, and the  
like, he had to know what to mix to give him the shades he needed when  
he went outside.

Marty


On Mar 24, 2008, at 12:12 PM, Michael Porter wrote:

> On Mar 24, 2008, at 11:11 AM, Marty Weiss wrote:
> > Thousands of artists over hundreds of years are all wrong?
> > Leonardo, DaVinci, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, Ms. Kennedy (my 9th grade
> > art teacher), and so on?   were they all wrong?
>
>
> You're suggesting that these artists believed that red, yellow and
> blue were the only three colours of paint necessary to create their
> works, and that they did so. This is obviously not the case -- most
> artists (the non-digital ones) use a variety of pigments, not just
> three. Maybe an art teacher, discussing the theory of colour, would
> worry about primary colours -- I doubt Renoir did.
>
> I always thought that a casual glance at the true subtractive
> primaries might lead to the misconception -- cyan looks blue, magenta
> is kind of red...
>
> Or maybe artists are just not that efficient. If you want to create
> any colour that the eye can perceive (or the brain, if you want to
> revive that argument from CHEMED-L), then C+M+Y (+black to thicken
> things up) is the *least* number of colours necessary. How many
> painters do you know have just those colours on their palette?
>
> Mike
>
> ---
> Michael Porter
> Colonel By Secondary School
> Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
>
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