Contrast of
Complimentaries

Contrast of complementaries, although it is probably the most brazen of all color effects, harbors at least two oddities. In spite the fact that complementaries are based on what we must accept as a natural phenomenon, the negative afterimage, they are very difficult to determine according to everybody's satisfaction. Different systems propose slightly different alignments. A second curiosity, which we shall return to, is that: Whereas true complementaries exist as polar opposites in terms of chromatic sensation, they aspire to a kind of dynamic balance, to an animated repose, as seen in the Taoist Yin-Yang circle. Therefore, is it any wonder that complementary colors have been understood by many artists since the Renaissance, and by virtually every color theorists, as potentially harmonious?

The mixture of the three additive primaries of light [usually described as red, green, and blue, although Maxwell was more correct, I believe, in calling them vermilion [orange-red], emerald green[a slightly bluish green], and ultramarine blue [violet-blue] will produce white light; actually a light primary and its complementary will also produce white light. But the mixture of the three light complementaries [referred to as the subtractive primaries]--yellow, cyan [a greenish blue], and magenta [a reddish purple, or between crimson and purple]--will bring about opposite results: Each on its own will subtract a primary from white light; the combined subtraction of two of them will yield a primary; the combined subtraction of all three of them will result in black, the absence of light. Both physicists and psychologists have been able to mix reflected colors additively by means of a rotating disc. If the surface of this disc is divided evenly, like a pie, into alternating wedge-shapes of true complementary colors and then rotated, the colors will fuse in the eye to a gray. Yet addition of this sort can advance to a value only as light as, or very slightly lighter than, the value of the lightest color applied to the disc. [53]

So then, if the light [luminous] primaries, when mixed, will add up to the supreme wholeness of white light, the three pigment primaries [red, yellow, and blue] or the pigment complementaries, when mixed, will tend to subtract to the chromatic nothingness of gray. Beneath strange polarities and seeming contradictions in the kingdom of light lie all the lesser and more familiar colors around us in objects and pigments, the offspring of subtraction. A living summer leaf absorbs [subtracts] all the luminous colors form sunlight [or artificial light] except green, which it reflects or transmits toward color receptors in the eyes of those creatures equipped with color receptors [that happen to exclude the family dog, the bull that is supposed to react violently to anything red, and most creatures that lie between insects, fishes, lizards, and birds, at one end of the biological scale, and human beings, at the other end [54]]. A ripe tomato absorbs all colors of the spectrum but red. If a leaf and tomato were placed under a green light, the leaf would remain quite happily green, whereas the tomato would go black. The particular portion of the colors constituting white light that is transmitted by leaf, tomato, or whatever object one may choose, is said to be complementary to the colors absorbed by the object. Then, as mentioned above, there are the miraculous receiving and interpreting functions of human and other eyes "wired" for color. The normal human eye [100 percent color-blindness, we are told, is rare] reacts to light energies in curiously specialized ways. The retinal cones, after intercepting waves of light for which they are designed, momentarily conjure up the opposites of those signals.

We have been dealing alternatively with mixtures of colored light and the distinctly different mixtures of pigments. Perhaps this is the moment, with the help of Rood, to view both of these at close quarters. Rood, after pointing out that mixtures of colored light take place constantly in nature and that that kind of mixture is of a separate order from those obtained through the stirring together of pigments, stated the difference as follows: It is evident that by mingling two pigments we obtain the resultant effect of two acts of absorption due to the two pigments: white light is twice subjected to the process of subtraction, and what remains over is the coloured light which finally emerges from the painted surfaces. On the other hand, the process of mixing coloured light is essentially one of addition; and, this being so, we find it quite natural that the results given by these two methods should never be identical, and often should differ widely. [55] Rood advised that artists study the important differences between the additive mixture of light and the subtractive mixture and the influence of colored light on objects, he suggested that "in calculating for the effects produced by illuminating coloured surfaces by coloured light, we must be guided mainly be the laws which govern mixtures of coloured lights, rather than by those which can be deduced from experience with pigments; they are certainly useful in teaching us, when studying from nature . . . . [56]

But how is the artist-as-colorist to reconcile these apparently opposing systems? Is there no area of overlap, of cooperation, wherein luminosity [a certain degree of optical blending] is put to the service of vibrance, aliveness of hue? Again, Delacroix is perhaps the artist to refer to. William Innes Homer says that: In certain ways, Delacroix practiced "separation of the elements" [as seen in Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism], but his artistic goals were obviously less naturalistic than those of the Impressionists. His reason for "dividing" his colors . . . . was to create tones of unusual freshness and delicacy through optical mixture, rather than by mixing pigments on the palette. This meant that small touches of a complementary color might be juxtaposed over an area of a given hue in order to reduce its intensity without soiling the pigments in question; or--if the complementaries were about equal in quantity--to create the luminous grays that Delacroix called "half-tints." [57]

With regard to Delacroix's much admired and studied frescoes in the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, Homer says that "an examination of their shadows and half-lights reveals that Delacroix relied very heavily on this means of neutralizing colors without sacrificing luminosity. In the shadows of these frescoes, particularly, he managed to create a wide range of indescribable colored grays that result from the optical mixture of hues quite distant from each other on the chromatic circle." [58] [Signac invented an interesting term, optical gray, to describe the vibrant results of Delacroix's coarse juxtaposed hatchings of complementaries.]

In my opinion, lessons may still be drawn from Delacroix's painting and paintings by Monet, especially of the 1880s, the decade of Seurat's flowering. Robert Herbert, the noted writer on Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, counters many false conceptions about Monet's painting techniques and ways of layering colors. "I am not going to discuss every aspect of his technique," writes Herbert, "But I will document a few of his most important devices, enough to prove that he was an artful contriver whose technique, only in appearance improvisatory, was as complicated as Cézanne's, and usually involved as many separate stages as those which lay behind a Renaissance landscape." [59]

Study 12 . . . . We could carry out a study by creating a design of a pair of complementaries in their pure condition and one or more broken variants of each. The latter are easily obtained by mixing a bit of one complementary with the other in slightly varying amounts, taking care not to break either complementary beyond total recognition of hue. The design should correlate contrast of hue, intensity, and proportion. It may even formalize the kind of transmutation from one color condition to another that one may have taken note of in nature. An actual specimen of plant life may serve as source.

Not only does one complementary "demand" its opposite, but the eye "spontaneously seeks out and connects complementary colors." [60] Because every complementary pair contains all three of the primaries, the eye will try to unite red, yellow, and blue in a composition. Where one of these is missing, perhaps deliberately, the eye may experience a kind of yearning for the missing color.

All this may seem in opposition to the principle of grouping by similarity, which, we discovered earlier [Gestalt Psychology], applies equally to point, line, shape, or form, and color. It is a fundamental principle of color. Yet the principle of closure, which has been mentioned more than once would seem to apply here in a surprising way. Closure denotes the tendency of the eye to coax elements into a simpler whole: A crescent-shape will aspire, so to speak, to become a circle; one hue will call forth its opposite, and so on. If two complementaries are used extensively throughout a design or painting, touching or not touching, they will contribute to the unity of the whole. Much the same is true of a work based on the primary or the secondary triad--red, yellow, blue, or orange, green, violet--with perhaps less scintillation; lovers of the primary triad, like Matisse, often include a secondary "for good measure," and those who favor the secondary triad, like Gauguin and Bonnard, often insert a primary--which is to say, a complementary of one of the three: A green would arouse the red in the primary triad, a red would activate the green in the secondary triad. In the light of this understanding, we should have to agree with several colorists and theorists with respect to the idea that contrast of complementaries amounts to a type of harmony.

We are reminded always of the achievements of two great colorists, van Gogh and Klee, and how effectively they were able to use complementaries. Van Gogh's painting Café Terrace at Night, 1888, contains at least two pairs of complementaries: the deep blue-violet of the night sky and the greenish yellow [plus orange-yellow] light that almost physically pours across into the street, then a greenish blue or cyan and a few touches of red and broader areas of broken red and orange. [61] Klee's Villa R, 1919, also contrasts green and red [leaning toward crimson] and yellow and blue. The chromatic reverberations in both paintings are a bit like rich, somewhat dissonant chords sounded by a brass ensemble. [pp. 118-121]