Understanding Color

Since the age of Aristotle, great minds have questioned the various natures of reality: how a concept works and how humans perceive it. The fundamentals of colour were one such mystery. As an unstable property, the secrets of colour have eluded philosophers, artists, and scientists for centuries, until 1666 when Sir Isaac Newton discovered the properties of light. Thanks to visionaries such as Newton, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Georges Seurat modern understanding of colour can be explained in a variety of manners and can now be categorized according to medium. Seperated into ‘light’ and ‘pigment’, colours are viewed as individual entities as their application and combinations create alternate visual features that influence human sight. To understand how light and colour operate (both on a separate and combined level) one must understand the various components that make up modern light and colour theory. Therefore, by comparing the colour experiments of Newton and Jakob Christof le Blon, an understanding of subsequent notions on primaries of light and pigment can be explained.

In 1666 Sir Isaac Newton announced his ‘Experimentum Crucis’ which justified the properties of light as heterogeneous rays that, when fragmented, provide a spectrum of the seven basic colours, which directs how colour is perceived. The results demonstrate how colours of light are combined to create a single ray of white light. This then bounces off the surface face of all objects, and is reflected back into our eyes as colour. Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) elaborated on Newton’s concepts with his own additive and subtractive theories that divide colour into two individual factions: ‘light colours’ and ‘pigment colours’. Light co...

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...or orange, and is effectively used in Seurat’s masterpiece, most convincingly in the plains of grass and petticoats of women strolling in the sun.

The age of Impressionism was a crucial step for modern understanding of colour; as early as the 17th century, scientist and artists were already applying complex theories of colour perception and light to various practices. Without a proper understanding of colour, visual luxuries such as colour photography, television, and digital media would be nothing more than a futuristic black and white dream. It is thanks to the ingenuity of visionaries such as Newton, Le Blon, Helmholtz, and Seurat that humanity has progressed to a era where colour and technology can be used in a variety of artistic practices. These men are the aids that have allowed the world to experience culture from vivid and global perspectives.