Cultural Influences on our perception of color

Alison Adams 

Art & Visual Perception 

Week 2: Readings 

Cultural Influences on our perception of color 

In the two Oliver Sachs articles that we have read so far, we have learnt about two different men with two entirely cases who were both similarly forced to live in worlds where they had to readjust to a world of confusion and bewilderment. Virgel was a man who lost his vision entirely at a young age and was forced to enter into a world of darkness where he could no longer enjoy his sight. After this, he was asked to do the same thing again when he went through a procedure to regain his vision. He was technically given his vision back yet he was just as confused, if not more taken aback, by the vision that he now had and the memory and understanding that he lacked to interpret what he was now seeing. 

In “The Case of the Colorblind Painter” Oliver Sachs introduced us to Mr. I, a man who was forced into a world of colorblindness after an accident left him with brain damage. Just as Virgel felt when he first entered his unfamiliar world of darkness, Mr. I felt that “He had spent his life as painter; now even his art was without meaning, and he could no longer imagine how to go on” (pg. 6). Although Mr. I had seen and identified colors in his mind before he could no longer see them, he could no longer retain this information once he went colorblind. “He knew all the colors in his favorite paintings, but could no longer see them, either when he looked or in his mind's eye. Perhaps he knew them, now, only by verbal memory” (pg. 7). Just as was the case for Virgil, it seemed that although he had once had one, he now lacked an understanding of what objects he was presented with and he was instead left with confusion. Mr. I was now to encounter “difficulties and distresses of every sort” (pg. 8). Mr. I would now experience, against his will, what it was like to live as a household pet and experience the world through only two colors- black and white. 

Unfortunately, it was more than his vision of color that Mr. I had lost in his accident. “He knew all about color, externally, intellectually, but he had lost the remembrance, the inner knowledge, of it 

that had been part of his very being. He had had a lifetime of experience in color, but now this was only a historical fact, not something he could access and feel directly. It was as if his past, his chromatic past, had been taken away, as if the brain's knowledge of color had been totally excised, leaving no trace, no inner evidence, or its existence behind” (pg. 13). This reminded me of when I read Sach's article about Virgil and how he had been able to see when he was a kid but it was the time that he was in limbo during his state of coma that he lost his memory of what he had once seen and was therefore, unable to remember what it was to have vision once he got it back and it was rendered just as useless as when he didn't have it at all. Although Mr. I once had an understanding and knowledge of color, it went away with his lose of color vision. Although he could once understand the world through his vision of color he now “found the world alien, empty, dead, and grey” (pg. 15). Mr. I now lived in a world that he was not familiar with and that did not have the stability that he knew when he was part of a color world. 

I read this article after all the other assigned readings and after I learnt about the science behind how we perceive color and I heard from Arnheim that “No one will ever be sure that his neighbor sees a particular color exactly the same way he himself does” (pg. 330). I then began to think of the ways that culture influences our perception of color. Arnheim says “When a person is called upon to choose between shape relations and color relations, his behavior will be influenced by a variety of factors” (pg. 335). I began to wonder what composes my interpretations of colors, shapes, and objects and how my perception of what I see is influenced by my memories and experiences.  

Sachs touches on this question of mine when he said: “It is at higher levels that integration occurs, that color fuses with memories, expectations, association, and desires to make a world with resonance and meaning for each of us” (pg. 29). It is so interesting to me how much our vision, in several different aspects, is effected by who we are as a person and what he have experienced differently in comparison with other people and how they see the world. 

As an artist, I also felt particularly sympathetic for what Mr. I had to go through. Sachs said: “This sense of loss and shock was doubled and redoubled for Mr. I, for he had not only lost the beauty of the natural world, and the world of people, and of the innumerable objects whose colors are part of daily life, but he had also lost the world of art, he felt- the world that, for fifty years or more, had absorbed his profoundly visual and chromatic talents and sensibilities. The first weeks of his achromatopsia were thus weeks of an almost suicidal depression” (pg. 33). It was as though by losing color, a largely significant part of Mr. I's career and life had died and he had to start again, from nothing. 

Color was such a rich part of what composed Mr. I's world. He was constantly painting in color and trying to understand images through color and now he was forced to reinterpret what he saw through black and white. Just as Virgel was forced into a world of darkness as a alien that had to literally feel his way around, Mr. I felt the same loss when his memory of color went. “Mr. I's visual sense, but his aesthetic sense, his sensibility, his creative identity, an essential part of the way he constructed the world- and now color was gone, not only in perception, but in imagination and memory as well...He found himself now not only in an impoverished world, but in an alien, incoherent, and almost nightmarish one. He expressed soon after his injury, better than he could in words, in some of his early, desperate paintings” (pg. 35). He felt desperate to put the pieces of his world back together and to regain his creative identity but this was not so easy to do without a memory of basic color. 

  However, Mr. I finally went on to see some positive light in his loss of color. He came to see a world that was unique and different from what everyone else saw and what he once did envision as well. “Although Mr. I does not deny his loss, and at some level still mourns it, he has come to feel that his vision has become “highly refined,” “privileged,” that he sees a world of pure form, uncluttered by color. Subtle textures and patterns, normally obscured for the rest of us because of their embedding in color, now stand out for him. He feels he has been given a “whole new world,” which the rest of us, distracted by color, are insensitive to” (pg. 39). I wonder how I would react to a world without color and whether I would feel predominantly how Mr. I felt at first or how he felt upon this new realization. I think that I would definitely feel the same depression and loss that he deeply felt at first, but I would soon realize that I had no other option but to accept my state and I might begin to see the world as a whole new experience in vision awaiting me. 

On this aspect of colorblindness, Sachs said: “Jonathan I did not lose just his perception of color, but imagery, and even dreaming in color. Finally he seemed to lose even his memory of color, so that it ceased to be part of his mental knowledge, his mind. Thus, as more and more time elapsed without color vision, he came to resemble someone with an amnesia for color- or, indeed, someone who had never known it at all. But, at the same time, a revision was occurring, so that as his former color world and even the memory of it became fainter and died inside him, a whole new world of seeing, of imagination, of sensibility, was born” (pg. 40). Just as Virgel was forced to readjust to a new way of seeing the world after undergoing surgery to get his vision back, Mr. I eventually found that his loss of color was not by all means a loss but was also an opportunity. I was left with a sense of hope that things would get better for Mr. I and that he would be able to slowly adjust to his new world as he discovered the meaning that lay beneath his slightly blind new world.