the Phantasms of Colours

"by what modes or actions Light produceth in our minds the Phantasms of Colours is not so easie"

Like Issac Newton, I've found that understanding color and our perceptions of it to be quite daunting. So much so that I was afraid I was colorblind or had some sort of malfunctioning rods or cones at the beginning of this class! I have been involved in art all my life but have struggled in understanding the world of color. The readings, though, have shed much light on the subject and I hope my rational mind will be able to catch up with my visual perceptions. I was struck by the fact that though many cultures define the range of colors to be continuous in the color wheel, there is actually physically no "continuity between the longest-wavelength red light that we can see and the shortest-wavelength blue" (Livingstone 85). I was also fascinated by Livingstone's discussion of how color creates edges by means of surround antagonism (92). The visual system can give different responses to different wavelengths of light is interesting to note insofar as it enables the visual system to have another way to distinguish objects in addition to shape and luminance (95). This is interesting in the different sources of light we encounter -- daylight, tungsten and fluorescent. We don't normally notice the differences in these lights but if our color-selective cells did not have a surround organization, out perception of an object's color would vary dramatically. Its interesting that the ability to see a color is dependant on the surrounding ones. Though our visual system is adept to not recognize the color of the illuminant, the lighting conditions can dramatically alter a color's value.

I was also intrigued by Livingstone's discussion of peripheral vision is fascinating in how the mind will assume shapes and objects that are only hinted at, such as seen in many impressionist paintings. This phenomenon, illusory conjunction, has really stuck with me as I go through the visual world. I wonder how this effects our perceptions both positively and negatively throughout our daily lives. This brings me to Mamassian's article, which discussed the ambiguity of visual art:

"Visual perception is ambiguous and visual arts play with these ambiguities. Ambiguities in visual perception are resolved thanks to prior constraints that are often derived from the knowledge of statistics of natural scenes. Ambiguities in visual arts are resolved thanks to conventions that found their inspirations from perceptual priors or, more interestingly, from other sources such as stylistic or arbitrary choices" (2152).

The ambiguity in art is something I am very intrigued by and attracted to. Most of my favorite works are very ambiguous in nature. I grew up with a love of the Impressionists and am currently obsessed with the blurry nature of oil paintings and photographs such as those of Gerhard Richter. The ability of artistic mediums to portray movement and utilize the visual system's amazing abilities to import information from suggested colors and shapes is fascinating. I will conclude with a few of Richter's works and would like to explore further the use of ambiguity in our psychological perceptions.