Tip: Color Vibration

Paul Signac

According to Birge Harrison, the most splendid achievement of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the "technical means by which the scintillating effect of living light could be transferred to the dead and rigid surface of a canvas." He calls this effect vibration.

The Impressionists were the first to discover the effect. They obtained it by laying pure pigments side by side on the canvas. When viewed from a distance these colors came together and appeared to the viewer as the desired color, while at the same time giving that color a luminous quality, or vibration.

As much as Harrison admired the quality of the Impressionists' colors, he found the overall quality of their work to be diminished. Whether you agree with him or not, Harrison goes on to suggest an approach now used by many artists that creates vibrancy without sacrificing quality.

Richard McKinley

Basically he recommends painting cool colors over a warm undercoat without blending or complete coverage. Here is how he describes it in his book, Landscape Painting.

"...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 not to cover up completely the undertone, rather letting it show through brokenly all over the canvas; the vibration being secured, naturally, by the separate play of the warm and the cold notes. Neither alone would accomplish this purpose, nor would the neutral gray that would result from a too thorough mixing of the tones in the final brush-work."

Here are the advantages Harrison sees in using this approach to obtain vibrant colors:

• The approach makes more sense to an artist than juxtaposing small bits of colors. In nature, the local color of the earth, leaves, and grasses are almost always warmer than the light that falls on it from the sky.
• The approach is more flexible, in that it allows compositional adjustments to be made when putting in the undertones. This can be done without compromising the surface quality of cooler paint that is added later.