Is My Red Your Red?

Posted by Roberto Torres-Torres

One of the difficulties facing artists is the use of color.  This does not only refer to the choice to use or not use color in a given work, but to the actual color relationships in the piece itself.  Certain combinations of color can arouse intense emotions, drawn up unconsciously from the depths of the viewer's mind.  Other combinations can soothe and calm instead.  The question is, how do we know that the color we are using is the color the viewer sees? 

For a long time, humanity has treated color as an intrinsic quality of objects.  A red rose was assumed to be equally red regardless of who was looking at it.  "A rose is a rose is a rose" to quote Gertrude Stein.   With the advent of modern optical science, and the extremely in-depth study of light, it was revealed that color is not an inherent property. 

White light, as is shown by a prism, is composed of many distinct wavelengths of energy, each one corresponding to a different color.  Our eyes process the information, the light which has bounced from the object and into our vision, and our minds read this as a specific color.  This does not happen as in a reflection, but instead happens as a reduction.  This is important.  When white light hits a red rose, the rose soaks up every wavelength of light visible to our eyes except for the one that matches the color red.  Does this not imply that the rose is every color except red?  That does not fit our "common sense" approach to color.

This creates a strange paradox.  If color is affected so easily, could our own eyes affect the color as well, before our brain actually processes it?  Is there any way to determine if we are all seeing the same red when we look at a rose?  Color-blindness of various sorts exists, and just adds to the question.  A person who has yellow/purple color blindness cannot distinguish between the two.  This happens in the eye itself, for it is the eye's color receptors that are lacking, whether due to damage or a congenital condition. 

Maybe our eyes all do see the same colors.  When an artist recreates someone else's work, they usually have little problem matching the colors.  However, when two or more artists are painting the same rose at the same time, the color variations can be quite varied, and not necessarily due to artistic license. 

These are the thoughts that keep me up at night.

-RXTT-