Color Vibration!!!!

Color Vibration

In his book "Landscape Painting," Birge Harrison describes several methods of painting. One of the technique he labels "entirely bad" because it does away with vibration. This system, consists of mixing the tones evenly and applying them to the canvassing smooth flat masses much the same way a house painter paints his door or cornice." Harrison then describes what (in his opinion) is the best method to employ in order to create color vibration in a painting: this method "is one in which vibration is obtained by means of a cool overtone painted freshly into a warm undertone, care being taken not to mix or blend the two coats and to not cover up completely the undertone, rather letting it show through brokenly all over the canvas; the vibration being secured by the separate play of the warm and the cold notes... While we wish to secure broken color, we must avoid broken values, for the utterly destroy atmosphere… The explanation of this is very simple – nature deals in broken color everywhere, but she never deals in broken values.  The color dances, but the values ‘stay put.’” (pg. 37-42)

I think the "exact" matching of value is not so important as it is to have them near exact. As long as there is not too much local contrast maybe a little bit of value inconsistency from a warmer layer to a color layer on top of it can be fine (and even interesting) as long as it's consistent across the whole piece -- I disagree with Harrison on this point, and I think that values can create a certain type of vibration in their own right. As evidence in Seurat's piece below, closely related values placed next to or on top of one another can optically blend into one (the same as can color) when the viewer looks at the painting from a greater distance.

There can be vibration in line, value, color (chroma & hue), texture, and perhaps even transparency & opacity.