Gabe Mott!!! Color in relationship, Mystical street art, video, digital interactive media, nui gui, transformative space, immersive artwork

Please visit my current website for

• all things color.
• all things funky (my hand done all time classic canvases and transformative space)
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Color Eyes: Come to your Senses! Franklin

I was asked by Dick Nelson to summarize my experience of his most recent class. At the same time, Franklin asked me to Come to my Senses!

Following other presentations on the senses, I shared revelations on the interaction of color that I learned in Nelson's class and explained some of them using biological insights from Margaret Livingstone in her book "Vision and Art: Biology of Seeing".

Amsterdam: Visions of Van Gogh

Six years ago, I had the opportunity to travel in Europe for 3 months. I had lofty visions at the time as I traveled to get clear on who I was and what I wanted to do.

I arrived in Amsterdam with one question circulating in my mind intended to provide me with a focus-- "What do I Cherish?". After visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I was inspired to create a 6 foot canvas based on his painting "Almond Blossom" filled with responses from friends to the question, "What do you Cherish?"

That became the The Cherish Tree.

I returned to Amsterdam last Wednesday and was filled with adrenaline. At the Van Gogh Museum I found "Almond Blossom" as alive and vibrant as ever. Only this time, I understood better how Van Gogh made it glow. He had studied Delacroix and Vermeer and all the masters of color and light that preceded him. He truly delved into a conceptual understanding of how our eyes mix color to create vibrancy.


Note how the tree branch is made up of bold strokes of color from the same family to create halations. As well, some of the blue, beige and green strokes are the same value thus creating invisible boundaries. These are all techniques Van Gogh had studied and that he advances in his bold and crafty style. One thing I love about his strokes as he pushes the paint around is how much fun it looks like he had.

This was the painting from which I modeled the Cherish Tree. I asked everyone I knew to tell me what they cherish and I included their text in my painting. The Cherish Tree went on to become a sculpture that was the altar for the Health and Harmony Festival and was an installation at Burning Man.

Proposal for A Color Box

A Color Box
Proposal by Gabriel Mott
color box blog

Two years ago I took a color class with Dick Nelson that completely changed my sense of color. As I made discoveries about how and why certain combinations of colors created brilliant luminosity, I was astounded and wanted to share this experience with everybody.

Description:
A Color Box is a portable room about 8 feet cubed. Using a computer, a projector, a Wii game system and a screen, a person walking into the room will be able to interact with a color grid projected on the screen. By touching a color swatch, the entire room will change to that color.

Intention:
Inspire and educate people about color through scale and interactivity.

Experience:
You walk into a room and all you see is a grid of color on the wall. When you move your hands over the grid, the room changes color to match the color you touched.

Surrounded by color in a room that instantly changes based on your behavior is startling. When you are faced with how your perception of color changes based on your surroundings, your mind opens.

Installation:
SOURCE Interactive Arts Festival Maui Hawaii February 2009. This event is a four day gathering sort of like a mini Burning Man for Maui Hawaii. Approximately 500 people will attend.

Concept:
The swatches of color projected on the wall do not change color, only the background changes color. However, the individual swatches will seem to change color. This is an effect of our eyes called simultaneous contrast. Additional effects that will enlighten the user are halation (the brilliance and luminosity achieved with specific combinations and steps of mixed color).

Budget/Materials: $3000
All materials will be purchased used or at reduced cost where possible
Wii gaming System: $300.
4000 lumin Projector: $1400
8’ x 8’ screen: $200
Laptop computer: $400
Frosted Plexiglas: $400
Construction materials (hinges, locks, screws, paint): $300

The primary wall will be made of a screen (8'x8') projected upon from the backside. The screen will be filled with imagery similar to the color website I created called colorisrelative.com.

The interaction will be possible by reverse engineering a Wii gaming system. Johnny Lee at the Ted Conference explains how to do this.

Future:
A Color Box will be reusable and mobile. Following SOURCE, A Color Box will be available to show at other festivals and schools.

I need your help to make this happen. Visit the demo page for A Color Box to donate.

Thank you!
Gabe

Color Calendar 2009: Best Color Quotes of all time

In twelve months plus one cover image, everything I've learned about halation, invisible boundaries, luminosity, pure color, parents and children, and relationships between single swatches of color is presented along with my favorite quotes on color from everyone from The Beastie Boys and John Lennon, to Josef Albers, Goethe and Kermit the Frog.

Included are a few that are not in the calendar:

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”
Alice Walker quotes (American writer, b.1944)

"In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art."
-Josef Albers

“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.”--
John Ruskin

"Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways."
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)


"You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. Might as well be a rainbow."
- Toni Morrison

" I think art parallels life; it is not a report on nature or on intimate disclosure of inner secrets. Color, in my opinion, behaves like man -- in two distinct ways: first in self-realization and then in the realization of relationships with others."
-Josef Albers

"I've handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one. "
-Josef Albers

"I start from experience and read...always between polarities--loud and not-loud, young and old, spring and winter. If I can make black and white behave together instead of shooting at each other only, I feel proud. "
-Josef Albers


"The human being is played upon by various influences at various stages of his life in the body. We all know what climate and music will do to create different moods, but one factor often not understood or neglected is the influence of colour. It is always there in our surroundings, in a room, apartment, or house, in our clothing and in our furnishings. It can contribute towards health or take away from it; it can cheer up or depress the emotions; it can invigorate or devitalize the body; it can give pleasure to the eyes or irritate them."
- Paul Brunton

"Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world -- life as I see it. "
-Georgia O'Keeffe

"Listen to the Color of your Dreams..."
-John Lennon

"The colors of a rainbow.....so pretty ..in the sky
Are also on the faces.....of people ..going by
I see friends shaking hands.....sayin.. how do you do
They're really sayin......i love you."
-Louis Armstrong

"It's not easy being green"
-Kermit THE frog

"In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
-Marc Chagall"

"My skin is kind of sort of brownish pinkish yellowish white. My eyes are greyish blueish green, but I'm told they look orange in the night. My hair is reddish blondish brown, but its silver when its wet, and all the colors I am inside have not been invented yet."
— Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends)

""My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens: men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain fields down yonder? [...:] The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back to the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wheat in the wind..." "
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"All colors made me happy: even gray."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire (Penguin Modern Classics))

"I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty."
— Pablo Neruda

"He tried to imagine the sound of the color red."
— Pete Hamill (Snow in August)

"The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement."
— Goethe, The Theory of Colors

if words can make
you feel color
the essence of blackness
the brilliance
of the sun
its dying at the end of the
day
with its mourners
the pinks and purples
its birthing
with its
bloods and blacks
Color!
Color is what we strive for
Color is what we should die for
Color
is what
both
the Painter
and the Poet
endeavor
to achieve.
-Jamey Austin


"Colors are the deeds/ and sufferings of light."
— Goethe

To see the images that go with the quotes, I've posted higher resolution images of each month on the facebook color page.

This is the culmination of over a year of study with Dick Nelson. Take advantage of my 30 day money back guarantee. If you don't love it, send it back for a full refund.

Calendar coming soon from ColorisRelative.com

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”
Alice Walker (American writer, b.1944)

"You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. Might as well be a rainbow. "
- Toni Morrison

Dick Nelson

This page has been updated and is current here Dick Nelson

Dick Nelson is the teacher who deconstructed my sense of color. After his 8 week course I was for the first time able to look at colors and begin to understand how much of the three primaries each contained. I was able to understand how luminosity was created by combining colors of similar families. He taught me about halation.

Dick Nelson grew up in Hawai‘i, and after graduating from Yale University, returned home to become Chairman of the Art Department at Punahou High School in Honolulu. For 22 years, he taught everything from life drawing to art history, and of course, his passion, watercolor.

“It’s the quality of luminosity which intrigues me, and my love of seeing through one color to another, ” explains Nelson.

He is creator of the now famous Tri-Hue watercolor technique, wherein all the colors on the finished painting emerge by mixing only three colors on the palette. Since his retirement over 25 years ago, he has made Maui his home and continued his passion for education, becoming both teacher and mentor to a generation of Maui artists. [more]

Some words on Dick Nelson:

...one of Maui's most respected artists...
... a brilliant colour guru who pontificates from a high volcano on Maui.
...opened up my mind to new ways of looking at the world
...one of Hawaii’s greatest painters and teachers

He recently taught a workshop in Hilo. His greatest claim to fame may however be that he is the second most senior alumni to share honors with Barack Obama as a distinguished alumn of Punahou High School where he taught art.

32 Poles

With 32 Poles, I was going for a much more subtle effect than in the 3 other pole pages. By using a blue and orange that are complements and are closer in value and as well using a greater number of poles, the steps are more subtle and the effect is more powerful.

In addition the grid on the far left allows you to see the poles against a strong blue, strong orange as well as black, grey and white.

El color es relativo

Does anyone who speaks Spanish care to translate? Color is relative is mentioned in an Argentine publication-- Tam Tam.

Nuestra percepción del brillo y la luminosidad de un color depende de sus colores vecinos. Lo podés comprobar con algunos pequeños experimentos. En el primero, deslizando el mouse sobre el panel central cambiás el color del fondo. El segundo es similar pero ofrece la gama completa entre el amarillo y el azul. El tercero trabaja con grises. En todos los casos fijate cómo los colores invariables parecen más apagados, más oscuros, más vivaces o más intensos según cuáles sean sus vecinos. Este fenómeno de la visión ayuda a explicar algunas ilusiones ópticas; por ejemplo, aquella en la que dos casilleros de un tablero de ajedrez están pintados con el mismo tono de gris aunque no lo parezca para nada.

Whats the Point? Back to the Basics

For all of you saying "What's the Point?" this release is dedicated to you. The point is, you are not seeing what you think you are seeing. Your eyes are constantly adjusting to the context around them.

In the image at left, the two swatches are the exact same color. Now that I have told you that, you can see that. You probably even predicted there was some trick to this and guessed that the two swatches were the same shade of gray.

Let go of your pretense. When you let your eyes see on their own, the two swatches look different even though they are the exact same shade of gray.

They look different because of the background color around them. We accommodate with our eyes. If we see a dark background, we make the lighter spot brighter, appearing lighter than it actually is. And just the same, on a light backround, the same gray appears darker than it actually is.

These excercises are not answers, these are tools to help you train your eyes. As you move your mouse along the array on the left of ten shades of gray, the background matches the swatch you choose. As well, the whole in the middle of the upright rectangles also matches the swatch you chose and thus the background.

Our perception of color is adjusting constantly.

Color is relative, "(Yellow to) Blue Poles" pre-release

When you click on a bar from the color array, the background of the webpage will match the color of the bar you chose.

There are sixteen steps of poles. The background of the page entirely affects our perception of the color of each pole. Sometimes, a yellow pole looks as if it is glowing in blue.

I originally created ten poles with yellow on the left and blue on the right. The blue is a combination of Cyan and Magenta. The Blue and Yellow that I chose are actually complements.

My roommate Tessa asked me tonight, "Where is the green if it's mixing blue and yellow?"

If we had been mixing Cyan and Yellow, we would have gotten Green. As it is, we are toning. As we move from parents who are complements, the children gray.

When I made the ten poles and checked to see how the colors would appear on the web (primed for 256 colors) , the hexadecimal code was all mumbo jumbo.

I wanted clean language. I wanted a progression of color steps that matched on the web as I was seeing in Adobe Illustrator.

I made 16 poles, so that it matched the number of poles within the scheme of the binary color scheme. The progression is hexadecimal codes.

It's beautiful how it counts down on the left four digits and counts up on the right two digits: #FFFF00, #EEEE11, #DDDD22, #CCCC33, #BBBB44, #AAAA55, #999966, #888877, #777788, #666699, #5555AA, #4444BB, #3333CC, #2222DD, #1111EE, #0000FF

If you click on one of the blue poles on the far right-- say the third from the right, yellow suddenly seems to extend all the way across. And the same is true on the opposite side. If you choose the bar just two or three steps in from the left, from true blue, all of the bars to the left will appear yellow. And those to the right will appear blue.

Halation Horizons in the NY Times for Obama

In this article, the writer is juxtaposing Obama's journey to the classic American outsider icon. I was amazed to see the background of the image contain the straight horizontal lines I've been obsessed with from Dick's homework assignment.

In the class, we took the colors from a matrix (groups of families of color based on four chosen outside corners) and put those colors down as straight horizontal lines. (see my many posts of halation horizons)

I am very curious if this piece was created using a matrix of colors...

Happy Birthday Dad: Plum Halation

[the definitive page for halation has moved]

I was thinking my dad would like this set of colors, no idea why, but it's his birthday. Hey, Happy Birthday Dad.

When you move your mouse over the individual swatches, the background of the webpage changes to that color. As you move the mouse around to each swatch, you can see halations in the swatches.

The colors seem to change in the matrix as the background changes. The lower set of four boxes, is the same swatch set as the middle of the matrix above.

I had been curious how the middle boxes within the matrixes would respond without their parents surrounding them and keeping them separate from the background. Mostly, they serve as matching swatches to watch how different they look than the same swatches above as the background changes.

The Plum page is dedicated to my dad. He was born in 1939. Happy Birthday and may all your dreams come true!

ColorIsRelative.com launched

Color is Relative is a website dedicated to showing luminosity achieved through simple color combinations. On the site, the image at left is interactive. By moving the mouse over a single swatch the background color of the page will change to the same color. The effect is intended to show the impact of changing the context of color.

In the next month, I will be releasing my next series of paintings that will be based on the color theory I have learned from Dick Nelson.

You can also visit my color page on facebook. Seeing Things, Color is Relative.

The grid seems to change color as you move the mouse over each swatch. Take your time.

This is the alpha version, please let me know your reaction and make comments.

New Halation Horizons

Color is relative: video: halation explained

Gorillas and Halation

Softness into the Distance

Halation 2

Olive Wine

definition of halation

Halation 3

definition of halation