WinterPLAY Snow Art Challenge - Come Play in the Snow!

Whether you consider yourself an artist or not, this year’s WinterPLAY Snow Art Challenge is sure to get your creative juices flowing. Taking place on Saturday, February 20 and Sunday, February 21 – on the hill beside the Snye – WinterPLAYers are invited to contribute to this year’s first ever community art mural!

Local artist Sonia Burke-Smith, who runs the Boreal Artist Institute, is the Wood Buffalo resident responsible for bringing the Snow Art activity to WinterPLAY 2016. She and other artists from the Boreal Art Institute will be on site from 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. each day to help, encourage, guide and inspire all participants to make the mural.

Brushes and spray bottles will be given to participants to create their masterpieces. Whether you use stencils or let your own artistic creativity guide you, the goal of this WinterPLAY activity is to create a free-flowing art piece with no parameters. The end result will be a physical representation of our community’s diverse culture, our Northern Spirit and our residents’ collective voice. The added bonus of this activity is that it will live on long past the festival. Community members can re-visit the piece and see its many changing phases until spring rolls into Wood Buffalo and the last colourful drop of snow melts away.

For those who may be worried about the Snow Art Activity’s environmental impact, do not fear! Food colouring will be used so as not to harm or disrupt the area.

Lastly, the whole event is sponsored by KAOS! All participants are eligible to enter into the draw, where at the end of the weekend three lucky winners will be selected at random to win an amazing Art themed gift basket.

Be sure to check out this colourful event and make your artistic contribution to our community art project!

Land Effect

What is colour? For artists colour is an expression, a feeling, a memory, sometimes a taste or even a smell. Colour connects and expresses the intangible, the indescribable. It makes the everyday seem extraordinary and the extraordinary feel familiar.

      

What our brains perceive as colour is the reflection of wavelengths of light from objects.

In humans light is received by the eye where two types of photoreceptors, cones and rods, send signals to the visual cortex which in turn processes those sensations into a subjective perception of colour. (Wikipedia.org) 

Our ability to distinguish different objects and their various colours has to do with colour constancy.

Colour constancy is a process that allows the brain to recognize a familiar object as being a consistent colour regardless of the amount of light reflecting from it at a given moment. (Wikipedia.org)

Colour Constancy is why a white jacket still looks white instead of orange under the setting sun but like with other things the brain can be fooled. This fooling of the brain is commonly known as The Land Effect or Retinex Theory, devised by Edwin Land, made famous for his invention of instant photography and the Polaroid camera.

The Retinex theory first appeared in 1959, Scientific American magazine. The article claimed that it was possible to produce a full-colour image with only two component colours white and red. According to Land, we decide the colour of something by comparing its ability to reflect short, medium and long wavelengths with that of adjoining objects. Land considered that the eye and the brain (the retina and cortex) form a single optical system, which he called the retinex.

Have a look at the picture below, made available by grand-illusions.com. What colours do you see? Red, green, yellow, possibly brown? 

http://www.grand-illusions.com/acatalog/Land_Effect.html

In fact this is a demonstration of the Land Effect, since you are looking at a monochrome red image, with a black and white overlay. The only 'real ' colour here is red. However our brains tend to 'see' other colours being present. 

This experiment shows that even in reality colour is interpreted by our minds. It shows that our brains “fill in the picture”. An artist working in light and colour uses these perceptions like a great illusionist showing us the inner meaning of objects, connecting them with great ideas, and filling them with insight.