Blog assgignment 5.

 

How has the experience and experimentation of artists influenced our understanding of colour and the development of a theory of ‘colour vision’?

The experience and experimentation in which artists have developed our understanding of “colour vision” has been made firstly of Isaac Newton’s understanding of colour which was looking at colour in a very scientific way which led to Newton’s colour wheel. This was the first big change in how artists saw colour up until Johann Wolfgang von Goethe criticized Newton’s theory on colour as he thought that he trusted math instead of the sensation of the eye.   Michel Eugene Cherreul, had a theory of simultaneous contrast, where colour is related more to the way we perceive it; He explained it as “two adjacent colours when seen by the eye will appear as dissimilar as possible.”  These were two different views on how colour comes together where Newton’s view was a more straight forward mathematical view and Cherreul’s view was a more abstract view on what we perceive. Another person who experimented with colour and changed the way we perceive it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he experimented with light and dark areas in a prism to look at the colour changes which occurred when the edge of the colours changed. He came to the conclusion from this research that colour was only able to be seen once it was disturbed by colour.

I think that Newton had the best view because he was the first person to make the colour wheel and have more straightforward mathematical view on the way in which colour is formed. Because of  artists and scientists investigating the way people perceived colour the way artist considered colour was changed. Without these investigations I belive that art would not be quite the same as it is today.

Reference

Gage, J. (1993). Colours of the Mind in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (pp.191-212). New York: Thames and Hudson.