O
ver the years, there have been various theories about how we perceive colour.
For centuries the widely accepted scientific theory was that there must be three types of receptor in the eye, one responsive to red light, one to green, and one to blue. This theory emanated from the observations recorded by Isaac Newton in the late seventeeth century, that sunlight that is shone through a prism splits out into three colour beams, one of a red colour, one green and one blue, and that beams of just these three colours when shone overlapping onto a white surface in different combinations and levels of brightness can produce pretty well the whole range of colours that we can give a name to.
From medical dissection of the eye and so far as anyone can tell it seems that there are receptors (cones) in the eye that respond to different wavelengths, but this precise red, green, blue split is far too rigid in reality, and the analysis of these signals by the brain more complex, see David H. Hubel, Eye, Brain and Vision, (1988).
Hubel has a chapter on colour vision in which, because his findings are only rather nebulously in accordance with the academic wisdom that had pertained for centuries, he pussyfoots around a little. He freely admits that research by the time he wrote the book left many questions unanswered, one thing that had become very clear though was that colour perception is relative, not absolute. Colour vision is not meachanical, the eye isn’t a kind of fleshy camera, there are lots of things going on when we visially perceive something.
I come at this not so much as a scientist, I’m not that interested in the morphology of the eye, more from what colour is doing for us visually, more I suppose from the standpoint of an artist.
This approach could be said to be more in line with the way J. W. von Goethe came at it in his
Theory of Colours in 1810, a delightfully nutty book to read, but technology has come on a long way since then, we now can take much more scientific approach as the tools are available to do that. That is where I am coming from with my varifold experiments.