NOTES ON STEVEN BLEICHER'S CONTEMPORARY COLOR: THEORY & USE CHAPTER 1
- During the 17th Century, Newton used a 3-dimensional prism to learn that white light contains the colors of the visible light spectrum. He showed how a prism refracts or bends the light shining through it to reveal seven hues: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet… also known as ROY G BIV.
- The reason we see a particular color is two-fold. One reason is due to what we call an incident beam or source light that directly hits objects, thus illuminating it. And the other is due to the reflected beam, which bounces back off the lit objects. (See illustration of this phenomenon above.)
- The phenomenon of how the color of an object changes as the quality and type of light changes is known as metamerism.
- Using photoreceptors, the optic nerve, at the back of the eye, is responsible to transmit the light impulses to the brain. Photoreceptors are comprised of rods and cones. Rods see or perceive value or varying degrees of light and dark, and cones see or perceive color.
- The Ishihara Color Test is used to determine if someone has a color insufficiency.
- Synesthesia is another way of perceiving the world. David Hockney used the concept of Synesthesia in his painting Ravel’s Garden with Night Glow from L’Enfant et les Sortileges, 1980.
- Some people perceive all things, animate and even inanimate objects, with their auras. Auras are the electromagnetic fields that are made up of the same energy as light waves.
- Color can be used as a form of healing therapy, which is called chromotherapy.
