Can we talk about color?

Color the­ory, as found in most art books and art classes, doesn’t actu­ally help a work­ing painter all that much. You may find that when­ever you try to mix a spe­cific color, you get “mud.” You might cope by just get­ting a lot of tubes of paint so that you rarely have to do much mix­ing. Seek­ing clar­ity, you might buy a book like “Blue and Yel­low Don’t Make Green,” which promises a new approach to color, but is based on con­cepts invented in the 1700’s. (And writ­ten in an irri­ta­ble, pre­ten­tious, finicky style. By a guy who doesn’t know how to con­struct gram­mat­i­cal sen­tences. But I digress.) Or you find some­thing like the Mun­sell color sys­tem, which does a good job describ­ing color, but doesn’t show how to mix those col­ors after you iden­tify them. Read­ing books and look­ing around on the inter­net gets you a lit­tle closer, but mostly, by trial and error, you just fig­ure out what works, using a small sub­set of avail­able pig­ments. You mem­o­rize some use­ful mix­ing recipes. A lot of the time, you muck around with paint until you get some­thing that looks about right.

If you delve more deeply, you find that the sub­ject of color is incred­i­bly com­plex, because it requires rec­on­cil­li­a­tion of the physics of light wth the messy, non-linear neu­roanatomy of the human retina, optic nerves, and visual cor­tex. Most of what’s writ­ten about color is not for painters, and most of what’s writ­ten for painters is by peo­ple who’ve learned to mix paint, but don’t actu­ally under­stand color that well. One excel­lent resource is the very fine hand­print web site, where the author has done incred­i­ble amounts of read­ing, research, and test­ing with water­color paints. But the stuff he has on color goes on and on, and on and on, so it’s hard to find the real prac­ti­cal stuff (it’s there, and it’s worth look­ing for).

So, while I don’t pre­tend to have a really thor­ough under­stand­ing of color as it per­tains to paint­ing, I thought I’d try to boil down what I do think I have a clue about. It’s a lit­tle eas­ier for me, since when I was in grad­u­ate school I did a bunch of work with the psy­chol­ogy of visual per­cep­tion (I’m even pub­lished in the field). I will not, how­ever, sub­ject you to com­plex equa­tions, the details of oppo­nent process color vision the­ory, or tech­ni­cal color space spec­i­fi­ca­tions that are designed to meet the needs of the print, com­puter mon­i­tor, and motion pic­ture indus­tries (you’re wel­come). I’ll try to stick with what you need to know in order to describe and mix colors.

It’s become appar­ent to me that we must divide the topic of color for painters into two: (1) a way to describe color as it is found in the nat­ural world and as the eye per­ceives it; and (2) a way to con­cep­tu­al­ize how to mix desired col­ors using par­tic­u­lar com­bi­na­tions of paints. There is no sys­tem that does both of those tasks, so let’s just dis­pense with the color wheel and start over with two sep­a­rate (albeit related) top­ics. And we’ll get to those top­ics in later posts. I promise.