The Colorimetric Barycenter of Paintings

Abstract

The locations of the colorimetric barycenter or “center of gravity” of the pictorial fields of paintings were compared graphically with the geometric centers of the art works. The art stimuli consisted of reproductions of 1332 paintings of different compositional genres created by renowned Russian artists. It was observed that artists' manipulation of a color palette and their spatial control of color within a composition resulted in the location of the colorimetric barycenter of a painting corresponding closely to its geometric center for both representational and abstract paintings. This finding demonstrates the power of the center of a pictorial field to function as a balancing point about which artists exert spatial control of color among all of the compositional colors and the areas they occupy within a pictorial field.