Online Paintings

Painting is the perception and representation of intensity. Every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades in between.

In practice, painters can eloquent shapes by juxtaposing surfaces of different intensity by using just color one can only represent symbolic shapes. For example, a painter perceives that a particular white wall has different intensity at each point, due to shades and reflections from nearby objects, but ideally, a white wall is still a white wall in pitch darkness.

Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are of music. Color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next.

Moreover the use of language is only a generalization for a color equivalent. The word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations on the pure red of the visible spectrum of light.

There is not a formalized register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as C or C♯ in music. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic and derived colors (like, red, blue, green, brown, etc.).

Painters deal practically with pigments, so "blue" for a painter can be any of the blues: phtalocyan, Paris blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on.

Psychological, symbolical meanings of color are not strictly speaking means of painting. Colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this the perception of a painting is highly subjective.

The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to light in painting, "shades" to dynamics, and coloration is to painting as exact timbre of musical instruments to music—though these do not necessarily form a melody, but can add different contexts to it.