Blog assignment 5

The experience and experimentation of artists lead to four discoveries of colour,which influenced our understanding the most; the optical spectrum, simultaneous contrast/optical mixing, after images and expressive colour.

Issac Newton believed light was the key to understanding colour and created the optical spectrum by reflecting a light through a prism, finding that white light was made from a spectrum of colours. From this he created the colour wheel which of course has developed over the years but was the first we saw of complementary and primary colours.

Michel Eugene Chevreul invented the law of simultaneous contrast. He believed that “two adjacent colours when seen by the eye will appear as dissimilar as possible”. “There is no nuance which cannot be change into a very delicate, but also lively tint of the same hue by being placed on a ground of its complementary. You may also effect a change of tone in a given colour equally successfully by means of the neighboring colour of the ground”, (pg 191). This influenced a lot of artists to put colours next to each other on the canvas instead of mixing colours on the painting palet. It was called optical mixing.

Wolfgang von Geothe was one of the first to oppose Newton and believed “Newton’s era was trusting math over the eye”. He instead was interested in after images, an optical illusion that refers to an image continuing to appear in your vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased. He believed colour was unscientific.

The development of the colour sphere was created by Phillip Otto Runge. “He used a set of three primaries – red, yellow and blue – arranged in a complementary scheme around the equator … he shared a belief … with the poets Schiller and Goethe who related the polarities of colour to the traditional four temperaments.” He believed colour was an interaction of light and shadow and that it was symbolic, each having a meaning. Lairesse also had this opinion, “yellow for glory, red for power and love, blue for divinity, purple for authority, violet for humility and green for servitude” (pg 204) . Lairesse also made, “the observation that people naturally chose the colours of their dress according to their characters” (pg 204) which showed there was a meaning behind them that people naturally placed.

Next came the debate whether you should capture the immediate environment, which was the opinion of Gustave Courbet, or to paint with expression to show how you feel about the subject through colour. Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin believed that there’s a deeper truth beneath what we see. They used colour to represent the emotional environment and to portray how something felt rather than how it was exactly seen.

All these discoveries and experiments from these artists, poets, scientists etc. have hugely influenced the way we perceive and use colour and our understanding of colour vision. They have taught us how to mix and contrast colours, what colours go together and what opposites are. They were the start of illusions through after images and taught us how to paint with expression through the use of colour representation. All these techniques have been developed since but we still use them all in art and life today.



Gage, J. 91993). Colours of the Mind in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (pp.191-212). New York: Thames and Hudson.