Chapter 6 - Light and Color

In my opinion, light and color are two of the most important aspects of a piece of art. Throughout time, artists have played with art and color to produce vastly different effects. For this exercise, we were asked to compare a piece of contemporary art with one from an older movement. For my contemporary art piece I picked The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali from the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Salvador Dali The Persistence of Memory Oil on Canvas 

This painting demonstrates how many components of light and color are used in Modern Art. The vast change of light gives the appearance of a sunrise. Chiaroscuro, originally used by renaissance painters, is shown in this painting by the way the light rolls over the objects, giving them their rounded and 3D like appearance. He also uses shadows to do this. Every object in this painting has a shadow, giving it realism.You can see the core of the shadow in the dark part of the painting on the right and the cast of the shadow where it branches off of the objects like on the table.

Leonardo  Da Vinci uses something called crosshatching to create light and shadows. An example of this is in his drawing Self-Portrait in Red Chalk. The crosshatching creates intensity of color in certain areas, giving it depth.

Leonardo Da Vinci Self-Portrait in Red Chalk 

Cross hatching not only provides light and color but space and volume as well. Even though this was long before Dali, we can see that both artists used light and color to portray emotion and art.