Blog 5

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

Through history artists have experimented with colours and texture and have influenced the way we perceive colours today. The changes of art styles through times, have opened up new ways to explore paint and the use of patterns and lights. Artists have played around with colour and light to allow different emotions to be portrayed and to affect certain areas of the painting and sometimes to confuse the audience. All of these experiments have resulted in the colour theory of colour vision. Our modern understanding of light and colour begins with Isaac Newton(1642-1726) and a series of experiments that he published in 1672. He was the first to understand the rainbow which he refracted white light with a prism, resolving it into its component colours: red, orange, yellow , green , blue and violet. Newton took a very scientific approach to the way we deceive colour. On the other hand, Michel Eugene Cheveruel’s ‘simultaneous contrast’ was a theory that wasn’t so scientific, but focused more on what we see through out naked eye instead of needing some proved explanation. “Two adjacent colours when seen by the eye, will appear as dissimilar as possible” (petty, M.M Colour, Perception and Abstraction). Other impressionists such as Monet (1840-1926) used paint in a different sense and used optical mixing to create what he saw. Monet like the way colours reflected in the water. Boats, oceans and lakes were some of his favourite subjects. From these men (and many more), we have gained an understanding of how colour works, and how light is intertwined in amongst it. We have been influenced by these theories and over time artists have revealed more about the powers of light and colour. We have gained our knowledge from the experiments of light and colour in art.

Monet - Water lily (1840-1926)

References :
Think Quest. 2011. Monet. Retrieved from,
http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0215473/monet.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton