Through the Colour Lens Through the Colopur Lens | Page 8

Through the Colour Lens
Introduction
As you woke up this morning, stumbled into the shower after your first heart-
starting warm brown cup of tea or coffee, perhaps looked out the window to see
a blue sky with white or grey clouds, and then either walked, caught public
transport or drove to work through the natural and built environment, and into
your workplace, what did you see?
If your eyes were open, in a sense you would have seen most of what
surrounded you. Natural light streaming in through windows, artificial light
flooding your eyes and bouncing off everything around you and into your eyes.
However, in another sense, you would have only seen what you wanted to see -
your bedclothes, the kitchen surfaces, the bathroom, your reflection in the
mirror, and the clothes you chose. Perhaps only then, colour may have quickly
passed through your mind – what should I wear for work today? Will this red top
go with the blue pants, or will it seem too bright for today’s meeting? And when
you arrived into work, only saw what you wanted to see - the pale blue carpet -
it’s been there since I started working here which seems like centuries ago!; the
bright green and white striped top that your colleague is wearing – she looks
great in that colour combination; and the somewhat questionable choice of
yellow of the reception seating fabric - that sunny yellow creates so much glare in
the morning!
For centuries, from Greek philosophers to scientists, people considered only the
first half of seeing - the mechanics. Believing that our eyes were merely
‘receivers’, Isaac Newton (1642-1727) referred to them as “visual equipment”,
designed only to measures light waves much as a clock measures time.
Consequently, much research from that time involved optics, the branch of
physics that describes how light is produced, transmitted, detected, and
measured. However, German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
proposed that the human eye and brain play a critical role in sensing colour.
While Goethe’s contemporaries scoffed at his ideas and his insistence upon the
interdependence of science and art at the time, he is now credited with
anticipating much of the fundamental 20 th and 21 st centuries’ research into
colour science and theory.
As Rossotti (1983) notes, “Not only are sensations of color affected by illness,
injury and drugs, they depend on the area and shape of the object, its distance
from the eye, its position relative to the eye, the intensity of the light, and the
colors generated by the rest of the visual field. Nor is the sensation dependent
only on what is in front of the eye at one particular perception….since our
experience of color is affected by our memory, by our knowledge of what color
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