Tuesday, April 28, 2009

It's a Jungle Out There

No, I’m not talking about the economy. Today’s topic is post-impressionism.

You see, my nephew Mitch painted a picture that’s being exhibited in a Montgomery County, Maryland mall. The assignment? Create a work that resembles one of Henri Rousseau’s “jungle paintings.”

While Rousseau never actually saw a jungle, for some reason much of his work was inspired by stories he heard of “strange plants of exotic lands.”

Here’s what Mitch created (click for larger view):

Impressive isn’t it? But you might wonder if it really does resemble Roussau’s work.

Here’s a piece Rousseau painted called “Surprise!” (click for larger view):

I think you could say that both have that exotic post-impressionist look that Rousseau was well known for. The color palette also seems to have similar characteristics.

How similar? Well, you can certainly just look at the two paintings and see the resemblance. Or, if you want to analyze the color values mathematically, you can use Adobe Photoshop to generate a histogram of the image.

Although it seems complex, a histogram is simply a graphic view of the three primary colors of light (red, green, and blue)—displaying the number of pixels for each color at various levels of brightness.

For example, here is the histogram for “The Scream,” a famous painting by Edvard Munch:

The histogram shows that the reds in the image tend to be brighter, while the blues in the image tend to be darker.

So here’s how Mitch’s painting and Rousseau’s “Surprise!” compare when you look at the histograms:

As you can see, while the paintings may seem different, the histograms show that the color values are actually quite similar.

So Adobe Photoshop proves it—Mitch did a great job! (But I knew that anyway...)

Posted by Richard Bloch

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