Left Eye - Right Eye

How subjective is colour?

I've been busy with client work the last few days so no painting, but last night I finally caught up so this morning I'm recovering and sitting here thinking about colour.

I was just looking out of the window. Its a nice morning, bright and cold with some high cloud. I was thinking how nice it would be to do a series of quick little studies of the trees at the bottom of the garden, through the winter and into the spring. A nice test of catching different light conditions without having to go out into the bloody cold.

Looking through the framer to see if I could get a nice composition, I had my left eye closed. The distance between the framer and the trees was so great (I think the garden's about 50 feet long) that if I focused on the trees I saw two framers with both eyes open, not ideal for working out a composition.

Eye ache started to set in, so I switched eyes and closed my right eye. The first thing that struck me was that the colour looked different. Left eye cooler, right eye warmer. It got me thinking. How do I know when we look at the same object that we see the same colour? I don't mean in broad general terms like blue and green, I know that happens. What I'm trying to get at is, what if you see the same green on a tree slightly cooler than I see it? I see warm brownish greens (right eye) and you see slightly darker more blue greens (left eye).

As far as painting goes, it got me wondering if its not so important to get the colour and tones exact, what matters is getting the relationships between them right. Perhaps that's what conveys the strongest sense of light and reality of the objects in a painting to the most people. I'm thinking I should work out an exercise to test it, taking the same painting (the trees maybe) and copying it in different keys to see what happens to the sense of light. Or maybe copying it with different colour temperatures, or both. It would be a good exercise anyway, like a musician practicing scales.

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2 comments

Vitória Marques said:

I liked this post, because said about confuse colours in your eyes.I think to be lens (cristalino em portugues)that with time (old) yellow.Then, we change blue for green, because mix in your eyes,yellow(Lens) + blue.Will be this? Congratulations.

Posted: 2012-07-17 14:38:06

Paul said:

Thanks Maria, that's really interesting. I hadn't heard of that before, but it just goes to show how subjective colour can be.

Posted: 2012-07-19 08:43:03


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