A lucky break

I happened to pick up a book about colour at an Epsom Library sale last week, a book which I imagine was intended to be used by and with art students who are not expected to be either scientific or mathematical, so from that point of view accessible. 'The Basic Law of Colour Theory' by one Harald Küppers, with the title living up to the caricature of a bossy German.

Notwithstanding, a well used book including several pages of library stamps, including one from Tower Hamlets, presumably a special request from some lonely art student there.

But I share two facts which dispel for me two misunderstandings of long standing.

First, the colours of the rainbow are not exhaustive. They include the basic blue, green & red and they include between blue & green and between green & red. But they do not include between blue & red, these two being on opposite sides of the rainbow. So to get magenta you have to do something else. A corollary being being that you cannot arrange all the colours there are in a nice neat line, at the very least you need to join the two ends up to make a loop.

Second, three colour printing is clever but is never going to be the real thing. Clever, because it uses the three colour machinery of the eye to trick it - the eye that is - into thinking that it is seeing lots of nice colours. But it is never going to be the real thing because what the eye gets is the ambient light reflected off the bit of colour in question, and so what the eye gets and what you think you are seeing is as much a function of the ambient light - which varies a good deal from time to time and from place to place - as a function of whatever it is you are looking at.

Which boils down to the fact that a reproduction of a painting in a book is only going to be colour-right when you are looking at the book in the sort of ambient light at which its reproductions were aimed. Which goes a long way towards explaining why the reproductions in the books of the shows that I buy from time to time have been so disappointing.

A variation of the problem of lighting art galleries in such a way as to bring out the pictures in the way intended by the artist.

And the next problem is to think about how all this works with televisions which work by emitting rather than by reflecting light. And what about films? Has a lot of brain power gone into designing the lamps which generate the light to be projected through film and eventually into your eyes?