How has the experience and experimentation of artists influenced our understanding of colour and the development of a theory of ‘colour vision’?
The classical view of 'colour' was seen as mysterious and incomprehensible in society due to its abstract nature and lack of explanation behind its principles, where it was believed the eye look the colour from the objects. Clarity come from the English physicist Isaac Newton, explained in his documentation, “Optics”(1704), as the theory “quantifiable colour-order” (Gage, 1993, p. 191). He discovered that light has properties that allow it to be split into a colour spectrum when traveling through a prism, and that this spectrum when passed back through the prism is fused back into white light.
But of course there is an opposition. Goethe believed a person's sight is based on perception and scientific and mathematical principle is not the complete truth, but rather an experience where feelings are involved. I believe this view must be taken into consideration as our perception of the world surrounding us is not entirely scientific and phenomena such as colour are able to enhance or disrupt the human experience.
This governed the research by painters to explore colour as a whole. Michel Eugene Chevruel noticed that colour changes depending on how they relate to neighboring colour, and therefore colour is controlled by the human perception - “Two adjacent colours when seen by the eye will appear as dissimilar as possible". Whilst this was going on in the foreground of research, Artists and painters where undergoing subconscious experimentation and discovered the true nature of colour.
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| Monet's optical colour mixing |
Gustave Courbet, a impressionist painter noted that colour is not blended in real life and therefore should not be blended when painting, he used many small pixel like dots containing different pigments to create a painting as similar to our perception as possible, this was because he recognised that colour is created by multiple pigment tones rather than a singular tonal blend. This was called "Optical Colour Mixing", creating a “visual truth”.
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| Picasso - Female Nude |
Soon after this colour became a representation of emotion, this was shown most informatively by artists such as Vincent van Gough, who used colour to portray a state of mind and emotion, Henri Matisse who focused on telling a story through colour rather than through the subject is painted. Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso focused on abstracting the female nude through the use of colour as this enriched the emotion of the Female body. This was highly important to how we see the colour spectrum today as it created a colour sphere with inclusion of shade and subjective colour. It taught us how colour relates to one another and how it changes depending on human perception.
Gage, J. (1993). Colours of the Mind in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (pp.191-212).
Monet picture - http://faculty.evansville.edu/
Picasso picture - http://livelearnloveleave.com/blog
