Colors made me do it!
Light travels with its full spectrum, most of it invisible to humans.
When light meets an object of some sort, it bounces back, reflects or refracts. If the human eye is present at this encounter, we start viewing the object involved.
The object itself absorbs all light waves, except the one that it bounces back. The object “donates” us that colour wave.
Let’s continue to keep it simple.
Light falls on an apple. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know the apple was there.
We call what we see a green apple. Actually, the apple is everything BUT green.
We look at this green apple in the sunset. The light is different than the one at noon, the apple reflects other colours, but we still know this is a green apple.
We both look at it and agree it’s a green apple. But there is no way of comparing your brain experience with mine, we can’t be 100% sure the colour you call green is the same colour I see still, we agree, and both use the word we have given to the colour. Most probably we see the same green, because the human eye evolved in very similar ways.
Show this to a colour-blind person, or a cat, a bee, an infrared detector. What those will see it’s a completely different story.
Objects are a collection of properties, one of them is the colour we report to see.
That in itself, recalls different emotional experiences in the living beings that are looking at that object. Here’s how abstract art, a collection of colours on a canvas, “mean” nothing yet they can mean a lot, to each of us, to each sentient presence looking towards it.
From figurative art, hyper-realist art, we move on the axis towards expressionist, surrealist and plunge into “just colours”. This axis is as old as humans creating visual communication or expression objects.
Untitled with Burnt Sienna (2022, sold)
Some of the object properties can be experienced from a spatial distance: sound, colour, smell. Both sound and smell can be produced by the object itself but colour always needs to manifest in the presence of light and an object. And all need a “receiver”.
Illustrating the life of colours, when they actually are not bouncing off an apple but off a canvas who suggests an apple, is unique to visual art. This is why I consider, and am probably not very scientific about it, that colours are entities in themselves.
If you saw a Cubist looking person walking on the street, you’d probably freak out. I say probably because some get over the first moment surprise and then continue to contemplate that unique looking person, wondering about the biology that produced him.
On a canvas, that Cubist looking person will not defy the line of human biological evolution. On a canvas, that person is a collection of colours and when it starts producing a reaction in the sentient being looking at it, it becomes something new.
We again have the object observed, the observer and the result of this interaction.
Break-dancer (2023, private collection)