Color

At the Exploratorium in San Francisco

The science behind color is something that was never taught to me in all my years as an artist, and recently I have been thinking more about it after listening to this RadioLab podcast on color and visiting the Exploratorium, an awesome interactive science museum, in San Francisco this past June.

 I've spent my whole life as an artist, observing the world and trying to translate what I see in front of me into a two-dimensional expression, working within the constraints of the medium I choose. And yet I have given very little thought about what it really means to see. "The colors we see are tricks of the imagination. There is no perfectly objective view of color." It's easy to fool the eye - we all know that. But the fact that light is responsible for how we view color is something that is both obvious and mysterious. What I see is not necessarily what you see, so what is the real color? There isn't really an answer to that, is there?