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DR. BEVIL CONWAYIf I ask you to name some colors, or the color of a banana,
you would tell me a banana is yellow, right?
Well this is, like, weird really, when you think about it.
I don't know about your house, but in my house
the bananas are green when we buy them.
And then they spend, you know, a day being yellow.
And then they're, like, brown spotted and, eventually, black things
before we throw them out.
So in their whole life span they've spent very little time of their lives
being yellow.
But this is the color we encode.
It's the color we think of.
And in fact, it's so strong that it's the color
we project onto the world around us.
So color, we know, is not simply the light hitting our eyes.
Because there's all of these, what we can think of as cognitive influences
that shape what you experience out there.
My current favorite example of the interaction between art practice
and the neuroscience of color is really a close reading of Matisse.
In many of his finished canvases he actually
leaves these little white bits of an unpainted canvas between painted marks.
And it's a discovery he made.
Because by introducing this little white buffer
you protect from color contrast-- color induction--
you protect the colored marks so that they
remain about the same in the finished painting
as they were when he first made them.
So as he's painting in the studio, and he wants his apple to stay that color,
he can paint the background lots of other colors,
and have the apple still stay that color by just not painting next to it.
Just leaving a little bit of white around it.
So color contrast is the simple phenomenon
that is when you when you paint a mark, the color of the painted mark
changes as you paint the background around the mark.
And this is a problem that new artists struggle with-- old artists struggle
with.
And that's because the color of the background,
unconsciously, is changing the way in which the color of the foreground
appears.
And our brains do this effortlessly and unconsciously.
So much so that you don't even think about the impact
of the surround in shaping your experience of the object color
that you're attending.
And that discovery, as it were, by Matisse I think
came about because of, you know, his struggle
in the studio working with paint.
Working with a visual system that has particular constraints
on the way in which it computes light information to generate color.
And the consequence on art history is that, you know,
it changed forever how we think about art.
How we think about paint.
How we think about what paintings are.
We see that legacy in Rothko, where now he's gotten rid of everything
except paint and canvas.
Just large fields of color.
And at the time that Matisse was working that
would have been considered completely crazy.
Like, literally-- like, I don't know what that is.
So you see, you know, the impact of these choices on art practice.
The impact those choices make on the trajectory of our tradition.
Western art history tradition.
But they also, in this wonderful way, produce this other discovery.
Which is that color is divorced from shape.
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So Matisse shows us-- and then is extended
through Rothko-- shows us that you can take color completely out of shape.
The banana's color doesn't have to be attached to the banana.
You can have a field of yellow, you can have a shape of a banana.
The fact that we experience those things together
happens because of, probably, something statistical
about their co-occurrence in the world.
Not because of something fundamental about their yoking in our brains.
Because if they were fundamentally yoked in our brains,
we would never be able to see the Rothko as a field of red divorced from shape.