 |
 |
 |
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|
Mind
What is color?
Color tells us whether strawberries are ripe, and sets the mood in paintings. Without color, how would we know they are ripe? "Strawberries" (c.1905) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Color is a microconsciousness. Like our senses of taste and smell, color helps us to understand the world around us. It helps us survive as a species, and appreciate works of art.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many artists explored the "essence" things, and they divided the visual experience into components, such as "color" and "form," in a manner surprisingly similar to how our brain processes information. Our mind continually seizes essential information from the continually changing information we see, distilling from the successive views the essential character of objects and situations. Jacques Riviere, the art critic, wrote: "The true purpose of painting is to represent objects as they really are, that is to say differently from the way we see them. It tends always to give us their sensible essence, their presence, this is why the image it forms does not resemble their appearance...", because the appearance changes from moment to moment. Neurologists agree with his point: this is the function of the visual brain -- to represent objects as they really are, that is to say differently from the way we see them from moment to moment if we were to take into account solely the effect that they produce in our eye.
Artists have long recognized that color and luminance play different roles in visual perception. One of the aims of fauvism (approx. 1901-6) was to give color greater emotional and expressive power, an aim also pursued by non-fauvist artists such as Frantisek Kupka and Adolf Hoelzel, who were more interested in non-iconic color abstraction. But what was color to be liberated from? The impossibility of liberating it from form on a two-dimensional canvas led the fauvists to adopt the only physiologically viable solution: painting common objects and scenes in the 'wrong' colors.
Seated Riffian (Le Rifain assis), 1913 by Henri Matisse. Matisse once said that, "Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of things and beings, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation."
Fauve painters sought to 'liberate' colors by investing objects with colors which they are not usually associated with, as in André Derain's "Charing Cross Bridge, London," (1906)
In Picasso’s Poor People on the Seashore (1903), our ability to recognize the figures and to perceive their three-dimensional shape and the spatial organization of this scene depend almost entirely on the luminance of the paints used, and not their colors. Left, is normal. Right is monochrome.
Distortion of color was also explored by Pablo Picasso, who said, "Colors are only symbols. Reality is to be found in luminance alone." "When I run out of blue, I use red." Picasso's Poor People on the Seashore is rendered in various blues that differ from each other in luminance but hardly at all in color (hue). The melancholy blue color serves an emotional role, but does not affect our recognition. The biological basis for the fact that color and luminance can play distinct roles in our perception of art, or of real life, is that color and luminance are analyzed by different subdivisions of our visual system, and these two subdivisions are responsible for different aspects of visual perception. The parts of our brain that process information about color are located several inches away from the parts that analyze luminance -- as anatomically distinct as vision is from hearing.
The paintings by Derain and Picasso achieve their effect, in part, because our color microconsciousness does a lot of thinking. Seeing color is a complicated process that is more than just a recording of the wavelengths of light rays that reach our eyes. To our mind, a banana looks yellow during a sunny picnic. Yet it also looks yellow by candlelight, and under fluorescent lights. In each of those situations, the light illuminating the banana differs considerably. Even though a banana produces different compositions of wavelengths in different circumstances, our minds seek to ascertain the essence of the banana. Our yellow sensation tells us that bananas reflect a lot of yellow, even though more orange or green might actually reach our eyes, depending on the illuminant. This phenomenon of color constancy is complex, yet central to life, appearing in animals as simple as goldfish.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Our mind acts in accordance with Kant's (1783) statement in his Prolegomena that 'The Mind does not derive its laws (a priori) from nature, but prescribes them to her.'
Color is a property of objects that our minds create -- an interpretation -- and this property is unique to humans and higher primates. This interpretation helps us acquire knowledge about the properties of surfaces. To construct colors, our subconscious mind analyzes ratios of the signals from photoreceptors in the retina. Today, researchers are studying how the nerve cells in critical areas of the brain undertake the ratio-taking operation.
Without this approximate constancy, a banana would not appear as a banana each time we see it. Similarly, a piece of chalk on a cloudy day would manifest the same color as a piece of coal does on a sunny day, and in the course of a single day, it would have to assume all possible colors that lie between black and white.
