Color is the most ubiquitous as well as least understood visual phenomenon in nature.
Color is absolutely relative--what color you perceive depends on specific light conditions as well surrounding colors and the perceptual capablities of the viewer.
Color can envoke royalty and social status, pride in one's country, the devine, or contamination and disease.
As technology advanced, new pigments became available for the artist. The greatest advancement in art history is arguably the creation of oil paint.
Any student of art or art enthusiast recognizes the uniqueness of oil paint: its luminosity, its vibrance, and its staying power.
As an art student, I was terrified of color.
Its extreme relativity has, since my first forays into acrylic and oil painting, challenged me and left me unhappy with almost every artistic color choice I have made.
I designed this project to try and lift the viel and gain a new perspective on the palette's of the great wealth of paintings in art history.
Paintings offer a strict environment in which no coordinate is extraneous--artists have full control over the two dimensional surface and each and every mark that appears there.
Paintings also offer a huge pre-existing database of images and palettes for my algorithm to explore and analyze.