Andrew Fishman's art

A fascinating assignment for a Painting class I took.  We were instructed to paint from a live model and produce two pieces, one “objective” and one “subjective.”  The “objective” one was to be approached scientifically, and the goal was to make it as accurate visually as possible.  The “subjective” one was more whatever we were inspired to do by the figure and the pose, but grounded in reality.  (My objective is the one on the left, the subjective is on the right)  I had a lot of fun walking around the room and seeing how differently everyone approached not only the subjective one, as I would have expected, but also the objective one.  

For the objective one, I had the most difficulty getting the blue behind the figure to work.  It was foreign to me to not just paint what I saw exactly as I saw it.  I painted the blue the color of the paint on it, and my teacher kept telling me to make it darker.  I couldn’t understand what he meant, because the color was clearly accurate.  He was referring to the idea of “equivalent colors,” the idea that every color must relate in some way to every other color in the composition.  He was right—I had matched the wall well, but hadn’t accounted for the rest of the piece when doing so.  That’s why the subjective one has a different color blue—it’s accurate to the wall, and happened to work its color scheme and composition.