Afterimage in painting

The study first defined artist's afterimage using seminal nineteenth-century writing about afterimage and painting. The authors included Goethe, who described the psychophysical characteristics of afterimage in painting; Chevreul, who recorded afterimage hues; Blanc, who published color interaction charts based on complementaries; and Rood, who pursued afterimage to find an aesthetic guide to painting. Works by twentieth-century artists Henri, Itten, and Albers contribute further to the definition. Twentieth-century art educator Burchett demonstrated that color interaction, an optical experience generated by afterimage, is considered by many experts a component of color harmony. After a basic definition of an artist's afterimage was compiled, a quantitative study using the phenomenon of the artist's afterimage then identified stimulus and afterimage shape in three paintings: Arabs Skirmishing in the Mountains by Eugene Delacroix, Sissy by Robert Henri, and Wales by Helen Frankenthaler. The quantitative study was modelled on the research by Marian-Ortolf Bagley and Margaret Sathre Maxfield on afterimage hues and the principle of Emmert's Law in regard to afterimage size constancy. One hundred and eight experimental matches tested the hypothesis that features of stimulus and afterimage shape pairs can be identified in paintings. Over seventy-two percent of the experiments resulted in judges matching their subjective afterimage hues to within two Munsell intervals of the paintings' target afterimages. Judges also compared the effect of background hue from paintings with the perception of the afterimage hue with the results showing that the stimulus and afterimage made unique hue pairs depending upon background hue. It was also found that judges with experience in painting were more likely to select the target afterimage hues than those who did not engage in color matching activities. The study explores afterimage perception as a tool for the psychophysical method of painting criticism. The study supports Rudolf Arnheim's suggestion that inquiry into the psychology of art will find commonalities in the structure of art.