It was June. It had rained all afternoon, but just before sunset, the clouds parted. I decided to take a walk to a local public garden, and to take my camera along with me - a nearly decade-old DSLR that has somehow survived through my many moves: to college, to a squirrel-infested attic room in NJ, in and out of graduate housing, out to the suburbs, and then finally, to my current home in Princeton.
It was the time of day when the treetops begin to glow, and I was glad to have a way to capture it. While I knelt on the paver stones, trying to shoot a very curious praying mantis, I started to think about the importance of light both in my own artistic practice, and more broadly, in the ways we see and interpret color.
I have always had an obsession with how we see color. Is my blue the same as yours?
Surely so, in a sense, but when I close my left eye and look only through my right, the colors that I see look slightly different than when I look only through my left eye. As a child, I would spend hours, closing one eye and then the other, watching the room flicker in tones much warmer in one eye, and then much cooler in the other.
This alarmed me greatly, but it turns out that this phenomenon is quite normal–a product of small asymmetries in the left and right eyes. As I have aged, the difference between my eyes has lessened. Owing to the imperfect nature of the human body, our eyes do not age completely in tandem. Over time, I suppose that mine have more or less equalized.
Much like my eyes, theories on the science of color and its intimate relation to light have also changed quite drastically over the years. It began with Aristotle, who in Book III of his De Anima states that "in a sense, light makes potential colours into actual colours." (For a particularly illustrative example of this, see Olafur Eliasson’s 1997's installation, Room for One Colour.)
Of course, most of what Aristotle wrote about the science of colors (ie: that they came down from God, in the form of earth, air, water, and fire…) was not accurate, as far as physics is concerned. It was not until 1665 that we began to understand, from a reasoned scientific standpoint, what color really is. While the bubonic plague spread across Europe, Isaac Newton began to experiment in isolation. In a controlled environment (a dark room with a mostly-covered window) he shone a lone sunbeam through a prism, and out came a rainbow. He concluded, correctly, that sunlight - what we call white light, is composed of seven different colors. This quarantine project ended up revolutionizing the science of light, when Netwon later published his results (launching his now-famed scientific career) in 1672.
Now, centuries later, we know an enormous amount about light and the critical role it plays in our perception of color. We know that different colors correspond to different wavelengths of light, and that the colors we see are a product of both the wavelengths of light that are shining on an object, as well as the wavelengths of light that the object itself reflects and absorbs.
This brings me to another of my favorite musings on light and color: Donna Kane's villanelle, On Visible Light, in which she writes that "knowledge is the fruiting body of light/ whose shadows dog us." The poem, which is certainly worth a read, makes an interesting nod to the physics of color perception, the bouncing and absorbing of light, and ultimately the transmission of knowledge through photons.
The incredible ability to glean a useful bit of information from light has been present on Earth for around 550 million years - long before humans developed the ability to ponder what light and color are. The earliest glimmers of vision came in the form of phototaxic cyanobacteria, that were able to sense and respond to light. Then later, there came eyes in the form of mere spots which can tell the difference between light and dark. Today, humans are but one among many organisms that can see color.
We have this ability because of rods and cones. It never ceases to amaze me that these are cells that can sense electromagnetic radiation. Indeed, our ability to see color comes from our cone cells – 6 or 7 million of them in each eye. These tiny cells each have the amazing ability to sense either red, green, or blue light. Combined, they allow us to see wavelengths of light ranging from roughly 380 to 750 nm. This of course represents just a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. We know this because we have built machines that can detect wavelengths invisible to our eyes.
But our eyes are not perfect detectors, even within the limited spectra that they can observe. Our cones function well if there is enough light around, but as the light dims, our ability to detect color significantly decreases. We see in low light largely due to rod cells, which can detect lower levels of light, but cannot detect color. In the dark, we are essentially colorblind.
Perhaps it is for this reason that as a painter, I feel entirely beholden to light. Particularly in my landscape painting practice, every decision about color is made with light taken into account. A touch of light can breathe life into a painting. It brings form and shape, as well as emotion and movement. In art, color is everything.
The emotion of color is another fascinating rabbit hole, and I would be remiss in writing about it without at least briefly mentioning Goethe’s thoughts on the topic. Goethe was fairly opposed to a purely scientific view of color, and tended to preach from a more humanistic standpoint. His work, Theory of Colors, contains an incredibly interesting section on the emotions of various colors, in which he writes:
“People experience a great delight in colour, generally. The eye requires it as much as it requires light. We have only to remember the refreshing sensation we experience, if on a cloudy day the sun illumines a single portion of the scene before us and displays its colours. That healing powers were ascribed to coloured gems, may have arisen from the experience of this indefinable pleasure.”
It is that “indefinable pleasure” that I seek to capture when I paint landscapes, flowers, or any other part of the natural world. Though, I’ll admit it feels a bit like cheating to bring along a camera to capture the light, only to recreate it later in my studio. Much like my own eyes, my camera captures light and color by identifying and separating out red, green, and blue light. Unlike my system of cones and rods, however, my camera has the ability to forever capture these colors, encoding them into an array of pixels. This method is much more surefire than attempting to hold light and form in memory. It is a modern luxury that the majority of artists across time and space have not had access to.
Goethe wrote Theory of Colors in 1810, just three years before John Constable pioneered the now centuries-old tradition of painting outdoors, or “en-plein air”. By the time his work was translated into English in 1840, plein-air painting had begun to explode in popularity. For example, take a look at the paintings of JMW Turner, who often worked en plein-air, and it becomes eminently clear that Goethe’s emotional view of colors played a large role in his image-making process. Indeed, Turner was good friends with Sir Charles Eastlake, who first translated Theory of Colors from German to English. Turner took extensive notes on Eastlake’s manuscript, and even corresponded directly with Goethe himself on the topic.
This is a prime example of how art-making does not exist in a vacuum, and it has evolved alongside technological and scientific advances. Today, plein-air painting remains a steadfast practice among many painters, but we now also have access to many other modes of color creation and image making. I can draw up an unimaginable number of hues with a hex code or RGB coordinates. I can paint from a garden, feeling the light on my shoulders, or I can sit in the dark on my couch, matching shades in photoshop - shade that I cannot easily create with my limited color pallet of paints. As I move between these various modes of engagement, I am left to wonder: when it comes to developing a theory of color, who was right - Newton or Goethe? I think, perhaps, both.
While they may seem different, the scientific and humanistic ways of looking at light and color do bear some similarities. Whether we think of seeing color as peering into a narrow band of spectra, or whether our breath catches in our throat at the sight of a brilliant sunset, color inspires in us a sense of awe at the universe. There is as much magic in the way that light shines through a translucent petal as there is in the complex optics of the human eye, or in the notion that the world around us is buzzing in light we cannot see.
As someone who cares deeply about both science and art, I am inclined to appreciate both viewpoints. And while I could go on endlessly about the various ways in which scholars, writers, artists, and scientists have thought about light and color over the years, the sun is shining and my easel calls. Off I go, to capture some light.
Sources and Further Reading
Teviet Creighton, "Electromagnetic Waves," California Institute of Technology. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~teviet/Waves/emwave.html#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20known%20absolute,to%20femtometres%20(gamma%20rays).
C. A. Pople, "The History of Color." Caltech Letters. (2018). Retrieved from https://caltechletters.org/science/history-of-color-1
Ed Yong, "The Shrimp That Squirts Bubbles 50 Times Hotter Than the Sun." The Atlantic. (2018, April 13). Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/mantis-shrimp-eye-camera/557195/
"Three-Dimensional Electromagnetic Wave." Boston University Physics Department. (2018). Retrieved from http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/HTML5/threeD_EMwave.html?fbclid=IwAR2DMoRlCXG50qxfqNsMtDJnbl0s7BQHzcX7P6JLquXv_idtpVFYn-oLqDE
Eliasson, O. (1997). "Room for one colour." Olafur Eliasson. Retrieved from https://olafureliasson.net/artwork/room-for-one-colour-1997/
Aristotle. (n.d.). "On the Soul. Book III." Classics in the History of Psychology. Retrieved from https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Aristotle/De-anima/de-anima3.htm
F. B. Palmer, "On Visible Light." Scientific American. (2019). 92(16), 265. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/poem-on-visible-light/
Royal Society. (2014). "Wave-Particle Duality of C60 Molecules." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 372(2014), 20140213. doi:10.1098/rsta.2014.0213
CJ Kazilek, Kim Cooper. (2010, January 06). Rods and Cones. ASU - Ask A Biologist. Retrieved July 13, 2023 from https://askabiologist.asu.edu/rods-and-cones
"Newton's Experiment: Dispersion of Light." Florida State University. (2016). Retrieved from https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/newton/#:~:text=One%20bright%20sunny%20day%2C%20Newton,light%20just%20like%20a%20rainbow.
R. Rojas, S. Leite, & A. Zatta, "The Mechanical Properties of Single Microtubules from the Demembranated Gill Cilia of a Lamellibranch Mollusc," Dynamic Response of Granular and Porous Materials under Large and Catastrophic Deformations (pp. 301-307). WIT Press. Retrieved from https://www.witpress.com/Secure/ejournals/papers/D%26NE040305f.pdf
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