Recently, I finished reading Get The Picture by Bianca Bosker and several pages towards the end completely blew my mind in the best way possible. Big picture, all of it relates to the idea of color constancy. It's easier for me to just share a clip from Wikipedia to explain it.
"Color constancy is an example of subjective constancy and a feature of the human color perception system which ensures that the perceived color of objects remains relatively constant under varying illumination conditions. A green apple for instance looks green to us at midday, when the main illumination is white sunlight, and also at sunset, when the main illumination is red. This helps us identify objects."
In the book, an example is given related to Claude Monet and his paintings of Rouen Cathedral at different times of day. In one of his renditions, it's a painting from the morning and the stone masonry is painted dark blue. The book explains this was not artistic license, but probably came from Monet's ability to be able to override his brain's color constancy mechanisms and that there are people who can do this. Mostly artists. The scientist that the author was talking to thought that artists have the capability to switch this ability on when they want.
This was at the end of several pages where it talked both about how miraculous our vision is in how it can make sense of things, but then it went into how our vision gets filtered and constrained by expectations.
It also made me immediately thing of an early painting of Hammett. I am sure that I posted about this one, but I can't find it in my blog and I didn't put the date of the painting on the back. Darn. Anyway, here is the finished piece from long, long ago.
My guess is that this was from the 2nd set of painting classes that I took from Kat. One week, we used tracing paper for the image and this was the painting that I did. While working on it in class, I got stumped on the colors and I remember Kat coming over and asking me what colors did I see in the shadowed areas of his face. She was very patient, because I had to look for quite some time because I just couldn't see what color it was. At some point, it's like a veil lifted and I could see a color, but I didn't believe it. Finally, I muttered in a questioning tone "purple"?
Even when I said it I still didn't quite believe it. While the inside of his ears frequently are a light pink or purple, I've looked at this cat a lot in real life and I've never seen purple. If there was such a thing as a cat with purple fur (naturally not dyed), I am quite certain that I would want one.
I wasn't blogging much when I took the most recent set of painting classes with Kat at the beginning of last year, but another interesting thing happened with seeing color. When we were painting oranges, I suddenly became aware of or could finally see the color of the shadow that bounced back up on the orange. If I put the orange on a blue piece of paper I could see the blue that bounced back up on the orange on the dark side of the orange. I remember feeling slightly bit giddy about this, plus it was so much fun to paint these crazy color shadows. I really do wish I was actively blogging when it happened, but I still remember the feeling.
Both of these are strong memories and it's interesting to have a little better idea of what happened and why it's been so hard in the first place.
I know artists can just geek around color and it works if you get the values right, but I also think a lot of the time they are just seeing more than the average person.
All of this is fascinating.
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