Blog Assignment 5: Colour—abstraction, perception and modernity

Colour Vision, in my opinion best seen in the above example of colour contrast where the same colour will look different to our eye depending on the surrounding colour. Our colour vision, our ability to perceive colour is something that has been experimented on by many over the centuries including painters and scientists and mathematicians. This colour contrast according to John Gage in Colours of the Mind* said that it was Leodardo da Vinci who first noticed this and himself said, "The mutual reaction of colours placed close to each other so when their appearance changes more or less noticeably, has long been noticed by painters and has been labelled contrast by them."* So painters have been aware of this for a long time and have been using it in their work to use surrounding colours to alter the appearance of others in our perceived colour vision.

*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.