Fisherman at Sea by JMW Turner - How dirty colors turn bright.

The Metropolitan Museum is having a great exhibition of JMW Turner’s oil and watercolor paintings; originally I was planning to take pictures for all of his works, but unfortunately photograph was prohibited for this special exhibition. I took only one picture and was caught and warned by a guard there immediately, luckily they won’t force you to delete what you just took.

Turner is a master of light as we can see in this following painting - fisherman at Sea; I did a little research online before posting this picture of mine, and found non of them have good color representation of the original as the one I took. Even though it’s a bit blur (was took in a hurry) but the color is as close as it can get except it’s slightly warmer according to my monitor.

One thing the impresses me most about this oil painting is how the muddy color around the sun become so bright under the contrast of its extremely dark surroundings. When we are painting a bright object, more often than not we would feel it is not bright enough; the real reason for the most part is not the brightness of the objects itself but the darkness of its surroundings. Given enough contrast, the colors will fool our eyes and make us believe muddiness as bright colors.

Make a good use of muddy colors will not only help deepen the space of a painting but also make the painting appears more natural.