The RGB Series began when I made a little discovery by accident while working on a color sketch for a Matrix series piece that I was thinking about painting. From my experience of working on Matrix #7 (above), I became interested in doing a matrix painting based soley on the colors red, green, and blue. I was planning on using white to create various tints of those three colors. So, I drew a small sketch in colored pencil of a matrix of triangles. I decided to use triangles because I was basing the matrix on three colors and triangles have three sides. Therefore I would be able to create a matrix that would never have to have two triangles of the same hue next to each other.

I completed the sketch and was reasonably satisfied with it - to the point where I thought it would make an interesting painting. I set the sketch down on a table in my studio and walked to the other side of the studio where I store my canvas and stretcher strips, to see what size I could work it up to. I grabbed a couple if strips that were unmarked and began walking back toward the table to measure them. As I looked across the room I saw my sketch on the table and was puzzled by its appearance. The colors that I had done the sketch in didn't look right. I distinctly remembered making certain triangles a light shade of pink. From across the roon, they seemed to appear orange though. At first I thought that I had mistakenly used an orange pencil instead of a red pencil for the red parts of the drawing, but as I approached the drawing, the oranges slowly changed back to pink. I couldn't believe my eyes so I stepped back again and watched in amazement as the color changed from pink to orange.

I then took the sketch and mounted it to an easle and walked back from the easle and watched the colors change even mor dramatically. I noticed that where the pink was very pale, those triangles tould almost change to yellow. I began to wonder if I had been working too long that day and that perhaps my eyes were tired and just playing tricks on me, so I went down to the house (the studio is a separate building), and asked Martha to come up and see if she could see the same thing I was seeing. She came up and was indeed able to see the same thing happen.

I had never heard of this effect in all of my color theory books. According to them, red yellow and blue were the primary colors of pigment. Some books proclaimed that magenta, yello, and cyan were the primary colors of pigment. But red, green and blue were supposed to be the primary colors of light - not pigment. One was supposed to be able to make yellow by blending red and green light. but that wasn't supposed to happen with pigment. With pigment when one mixes red and green, one gets brown. Granted these pigment colors were somehow blending visually at a distance, but that effect had never been documented anywhere by anyone. So I'm documenting it here, now.

I spent the next six or so months investigating this effect and came to quite a few conclusions about to produce the effect. This effect occurs even when a photograph of an rgb painting is substituted for the actual painting and the effect happens when viewed on a computer monitor. To see this effect for yourself, click on RGB #1 (above) to see an enlargement on your monitor screen. Study the colore in the design - especially the pinks and the reds. Then get back from your monitor about 8 to 10 feet. You will see the reds and the pinks become more yellowish. Some will almost appear to be a deep yellow. The other colors in the painting will change slightly and will cause the overall effect of the painting to appear to glow in an unusual way.

The exact mechanism behind this effect is probably optical and not psycological. It is probably not a matter of physics either, where the light waves merge while traveling through space or something like that. at any rate, I find these RGB Series paintings a lot of fun and very interesting to look at and experience. Presently none of the RGB Series paintings and drawings are for sale until after further definitive research on this effect is completed.