les fauves

How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion.

In 1896, Henri Matisse visited the artist John Peter Russel on the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer, having never seen an Impressionist work previously. He left after only ten days, remarking "I could not stand it anymore."

Of course, strong color would become an emphasis of Matisse and the Fauves. Given the connotation that color can carry, especially when viewed within its cultural context, Expressionist art can be remarkably effective at evincing a wide range of emotions. Artists such as Matisse used formal techniques such as framing and juxtaposition to set apart these colors, to better achieve a simplified and abstracted feel for their paintings. These flat colors were often composed within a painterly style, using broad, harried brushstrokes and impasto. The technique appears and is relatively simple, though these artists honed their sense for depiction by studying the theory of color. The Fauvists chose color as their chief tool of expression, but many other artistic techniques play upon our perceptive tendencies.

Benday dots were widely seen in the work of Roy Lichtenstein, but they are inherited from the Pointillist tradition. Distinct points of primary color can suffice to represent a wide selection of secondary and intermediate colors when used deliberately in small scale. This technique requires the mind of the viewer to mix the color spots into a fuller range of tones during the process of perception, and was used to great effect by those such as Seurat.

Schwarz suggests that neuroplasticity plays a role in interpreting a pointillistic image. In his The Mind and the Brain, he suggests that priming with pointillistic theory can alter the image perceived by a subject. It is remarkable that the brain can construct a contiguous image from many disparately colored dots. Even when these dots are enlarged, the image can be resolved from quite a low spatial resolution. Our ability at this might not rival that of other species, but it is a testament to the unrivaled interpretive power of the mind.

Pointillism
Fauve
Schwartz, Jeffrey M.; Begley, Sharon (2003). The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. Harper Perennial, p 337.