The meaning of colour in art and vision science A Hurlbert |
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Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, United Kingdom
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| The ‘disegno vs colore’ debate in art history mirrors a divide in the scientific approach to the understanding of human visual perception. In the mid-1800s, the Poussinistes argued for the dominance of drawing, line and form, against the Rubenistes’ championing of the sensual, dramatic – but ultimately unreliable -- properties of colour. Likewise, early theories of visual processing proposed that colour was segregated from form, and much of what we understand about the perception of objects -- their motion, depth, and texture -- has been learned from the analysis of images devoid of colour. Although it is now accepted that the neural processing of colour and form converges early in visual processing, the two attributes are still often treated as distinct in behavioural studies. Theories of visual object recognition, for example, treat colour as separable from and secondary to shape in signalling object identity. The 20th century abstract artists also release colour from form, but celebrate colour as having its own identity. In doing so, the abstract tradition also faces the challenge of conjuring up the multiple modalities that colour possesses: a surface attribute, tied to the material properties of objects, as well an extended property of voids, volumes, and lights. In fact, the genius of every painter is to capture with pigments – limited by subtractive mixing -- this variety of modes of colour and material appearance. In this talk, I will trace the outlines of the colour-form debate using examples from key artists, describe some of the ways pigments have been used to capture colour modes, and use the duality of art and vision science to illustrate the fundamental phenomena of human colour perception. For example, JMW Turner himself evolved from a painter obsessed with light, shade and geometry into one consumed by colour; as he aged, his use of colour become freer, his line less pronounced, his subject matter more primitive and abstract. The abundant use of yellows and blues in Turner’s later works echoes Poussin’s use of the same colours – those “which most participate in light and air” (Le Brun 1667). The colour palettes of both reflect the fact that the human visual system has adapted to its environment and captured the essential variations of daylight and natural objects in its neural coding of colour. Turner’s love of the sky and its colours also points to the natural development of affective responses to colour – these are also fundamental to human colour perception and may arise from the emotional responses to objects to which particular colours are normally attached. Diagnostic colours of familiar colours also give rise to memory colours, which are embedded in neural representations and affect our immediate perception of incoming stimuli. Lastly, I will consider the role of colour constancy – the perceptual phenomenon by which object colours remain constant under changing illumination spectra -- in the production and display of paintings, using as examples Monet’s series paintings as well as recent laboratory work on the perception and optimisation of chromatic illuminations. |
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