Everyday
Color Theory

"Colors can change depending on the nature of surfaces."

Colors can change depending on the nature of surfaces, like the atmospheric oxidation of the Statue of Liberty's plating from shiny copper to verdigris (a bluish-green patina). In 1906, the Army Corps of Engineers vetoed a proposal from the United States Congress to restore the statue, concluding that the patina protecting the underlying metal from corrosion “softened the outlines, and made it beautiful.”

We can see those softened outlines because light helps us discern forms. I find Vantablack—one of the darkest known substances, absorbing 99.96% of visible light—unsettling. As Kassia St Clair explains in The Secret Lives of Color “black is an expression of light, in this case, it's absence.” My eyes hunt for the surface, and Vantablack leaves nothing to see.

White surfaces reflect and scatter visible light, and according to Wittgenstein “very few people have seen pure white.” In the essay “In Praise of Shadows” on traditional Japanese aesthetics, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki wrote that “western paper turns away light, while [Japanese] paper seems to take it in, to envelope it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall.” If you take a piece of computer paper, that you know is white in its normal surroundings, and place it next to snow, the paper may appear grey. A white can be light grey in poor lighting or a light grey in good lighting.

Or a dress can look black and blue under yellow light and white and gold in blue light.

"In color therapy, shifts in color can change minds."

In full sunlight, the petals of a red flower appear bright red against duller green leaves. At dusk, the red flowers become darker while blue flowers appear brighter than they did in full daylight. This effect is called the Purkinje shift.

Albers based his career on studying these kinds of shifts in color. In his book Interaction of Color, first published in 1963, he created color theory exercises that could make “colors lie”—as Tamara Shopsin put it in her essay "Homage to an Homage of an Homage." By itself, a color appears dominant, but when placed next to an even stronger hue, we can see its more diminished true nature.

Sixty years before Interaction of Color, the artist and historian Emily Noyes Vanderpoel published color studies in her forgotten book, Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color. Her work predicted trends that wouldn't occur for several decades, like the concentric square format of Albers's Homage to the Square.

In color therapy, also known as chromotherapy, shifts in color can change minds. Each color is believed to have healing energies that can affect the body, like red for passion, green for harmony, and violet for intuition. One method for administering chromotherapy includes eating foods of a specific color. The artist Sophie Calle does this in her series The Chromatic Diet. Inspired by Paul Auster's Leviathan, in which a character inspired by Sophie Calle herself restricts her diet to foods of a single color on certain days, Calle recreates and photographs each meal in the book as an act to bring herself and the fictional character closer together.

An inventor in Arkansas advertised Vision-Dieter, his special two-color tinted glasses that deter shoppers from buying brightly-colored food packages. He boasted that “you won't believe your eyes” and that the combination of a blue and brown tint was a “secret European color technology.” But the product didn't work and the FDA destroyed most of the glasses.

"Ultramarine was the most expensive blue used by Renaissance painters."

Before the computer, the physical production of pigments limited our access to color. Naturally occurring, finely ground minerals mixed with toxic solvents — or the urine of cows fed mango leaves — were expensive. Ultramarine was the most expensive blue used by Renaissance painters and remained available only to the rich, or those backed by wealthy benefactors, until the invention of a synthetic version in 1826.

In “On Color,” Sillman notes that most oil painters can tell the difference between colors from their weight alone, but that also means we're “somewhat doomed to the palette provided by manufacturers.” Even our ready-made digital palettes are predetermined for us by the choices of both software and hardware manufacturers. (Or whoever we borrow from when using the eyedropper tool.)

Our perceptions of people or objects in photographs change dramatically from black and white to color. If I see myself in a black and white photo, I am far less critical about my polychromatic flaws because they're filtered out. And if I see a colorized photograph of a historical figure or event, I'm surprised by how real they seem.

With the invention of movable type, the colorful heraldic language for coats of arms, was transferred into a one-color hatching system for books, wax seals, and coins. The graphic design duo Dexter Sinister tested the transference of color data to one-color hatching by converting a László Moholy-Nagy panel that he originally “painted” over the phone with a manufacturer.

In the Farnsworth-Munsell test, in which a subject has to arrange 100 hues on a continuous gradation scale, less than sixteen percent achieve a perfect score. According to Johannes Itten, one of Albers's instructors at the Weimar Bauhaus, distinguishing the many shades of a color depends on the sensitivity of the eye and “the response threshold of the observer.” In English, we only use about thirty names for colors in daily vocabulary, and only a “trained artist can discriminate and name a great many hues,” wrote Umberto Eco in "The Colors We See."

Albers believed that developing a sensitive eye for color took practice, but it doesn't come without a bit of work: Illustrator Tamara Shopsin writes that Albers's exercises “were hard and time-consuming”; Sillman compared his Interaction of Color to notes from a test kitchen: “To do his exercises, you first have to gather color swatches like ingredients, splice and dice them, layer them and shift them around to test them out on your eyeballs.”

“When one becomes infatuated with the seven [spectral] colors, the mind is easily distracted,” wrote Masanoba Fukuoka, in his manifesto One-Straw Revolution. One of the most important organic farmers of the twentieth century, Fukuoka believed that viewing the colors of the world with “no-mind” — a state that recognizes the insufficiency of intellectual knowledge — helps one see the color of the colorless as color.

"Colors are the children of light, and light is their mother."

A flat gray surface can come to life through its small modulations of shading, which requires a visual sensitivity to tonal differences. The act of arranging the subtle differences is like arranging lengths of sticks or consecutive numbers, according to Wittgenstein, who once asked, “To what extent can we compare black and white to yellow, red, and blue?”

To use his own words in response, “Colors are the children of light, and light is their mother.” Notably, Vanderpoel also called color “the music of light.” Black and white, yellow, red, and blue preserve their relationship with light through the scales of tones between their lightest and darkest. The continuous scale does not change in saturation, but changes in brilliance. As all colors we can and cannot see differ depending on their surface, surrounding, and our state of mind—they will always in some way share their brilliance.