Images in ink, collage and colour……..

Over the years I have read a bit about the history and other sociocultural aspects of colours and pigments, and I might have posted something relevant in the past, although I’m not certain. Anyway, I will be writing more about colour and the book I am currently reading once I’ve finished it. In her book, The Secret Lives of Colour, St Clair affirms that colour is fundamental to our experience of the world we live in and begins by explaining that what we are really seeing when we look at an object is light being reflected off the surface of that object and into our eyes. She writes: “The visible spectrum only makes up a small proportion of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Different things are different colours because they absorb some wavelengths of the visible light spectrum, while others bounce off. So the tomato’s skin is soaking up most of the short and medium wavelengths – blues and violets, greens, yellows and oranges. The remainder, the reds, hit our eyes, and are processed by our brains. So, in a way, the colour we perceive an object to be is…. the segment of the spectrum that is being reflected away.” She mentions that about 4.5% of the world’s population is colour-blind or deficient in discerning colours because of faults in their cone cells. The phenomenon is usually genetic and is more prevalent in men: around 1 in 12 men are affected compared to 1 in 200 women. For people with ‘normal’ colour vision, when cone cells are activated by light, they relay the information through the nerve system to the brain, which in turn interprets this as colour, which she explains is not as straightforward as it sounds, because the interpretation stage is the most confounding.

There are a lot of interesting facts in the book about different aspects of colour, and the evolution or history of colour. One way of tracing humanity’s sensitivity to different colours, she writes, is through the evolution of peoples’ languages. It seems that everything started out with words for light and dark (or white and black); next came red, and then yellow, then green, then blue, and this suggests that two things: “the first was that colour categories were innate; the second was that if we didn’t possess a word for a colour, it affected our perception of it.”

Seasons and colour