I was forced to give up painting in 2005 due to the deterioration of my eyesight. At that time the issue was not macular degeneration — which developed eight years later — but severe hyperopia, more commonly known as farsightedness or long-sightedness. It had become very difficult for me to look at the more distant objects I was trying to paint, and then at the canvas, and then back into the distance. It was actively painful to keep switching focal distances.

The last painting I attempted was in May of 2005. I went down to Taylors Creek, where I had painted in the past. I worked for several hours on the initial sketch, using a violet turpentine wash, which was my customary practice. Then my eyes started to cross, my vision blurred, and my head hurt. So I packed up my gear and went home. That was it for painting; I still have the canvas with the sketch of the scene on it.

I went back the next day to take photos, thinking that I might finish the painting working from them, but I never did. This was one of the photos:

Taylors Creek, unmodified

A few years later I chromatized it by transforming the component colors using an overlaid template of Chromatist Spirals:

Taylors Creek, chromatized

The chromatized photo serves as a marker of the transition from my career as a painter to my avocation: creating digital images.

The following explanation of Chromatism accompanied my one-man shows for many years:

I call my painting style “Chromatism” in order to distinguish it from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Divisionism. I owe a great debt to those nineteenth-century schools, but I have departed from them in significant ways.

The word “Chromatism” is derived from the Greek word for “color”, khroma. Chromatism recognizes that a visual image in the human eye is composed solely of interacting points or areas of color. Like Divisionism (which overlaps with Pointillism), it attempts to create a more powerful image through the careful application of scientific principle. Chromatism, however, takes advantage of the century of neurophysiological discovery which has passed since the time of Georges Seurat.

A visual image is composed of innumerable tiny points of red, blue, and green in varying intensities. The brain takes two of these images, one from each eye, and combines the colors to make patterns of secondaries (cyan, magenta, and yellow/brown) and further composites. The tension of two slightly different patterns, interacting and changing constantly, gives us that vivid sense of visual reality which cannot be replicated in any photographic image.

I cannot reproduce the size, intensity, overlap, or movement of the visual patterns, so I must resort to a collection of careful tricks to imitate the experience of vision. The science of the eye is not enough of a guide: thus I remain committed to synthesis, compromise, revision, and approximation.

An example of Chromatist technique used in the final part of my painting career may be seen in this detail from “The Ivy Bed” (1996):

(Click to enlarge)

I no longer used any white paint, only turpentine washes of pure color. The different layers of pigment interacted with each other to produce the most vivid colors possible. In the close-up you can see the separate overlays and contrasting adjacent color areas.

I also forwent the Pointillist style, because a single dot of turpentine-wash color tended to leave a central spot of thicker pigment, meaning that the exact appearance of the point could not be easily controlled. I switched over to threads of color of indefinite length, which allowed me to drag the brush along until there was no liquid left in it, and the resulting color layer was thus of uniform thickness.

The goal of the process used in this mature style was the same as in all the earlier versions: to employ visual tricks of various kinds to fool the eye into seeing an image that was more vivid and “present” than any of its component parts.

Such was the animating spirit behind the following poem, which was used as an epigraph for each of the last eighteen of my annual one-man shows:

The Woman I Saw A painting is an artful lie, a hoax designed to force the viewer to mistake a few brush-strokes of pigment on a board for the pure blue-white edge of reality. The magician with his bag of tricks makes his way across the stage, and a white dove rises into the flies, while the audience sits beyond in a hushed silence, or bored. When sunlight slants across a well-worn floor the painter’s desire to mislead awakes, and he reaches behind for a clean brush. We painters know the rote of numbered line, the dry tamed texture of light, the feat of fetching colors wild in a field of white. And if, when we stand well back from the work, a spot in the center of the picture glows, an angel comes to assess the trompe l’oeil. And a woman rises from a box, and bows, displaying her sequined torso, intact. And the spotlight slanting across her back glows translucent within her pale-downed nape. E. S. May        September 2, 1987