by Sarah Reed

Conceptions of Color in a Colorless World

A world devoid of color, posited John Arthur Thomson, "would not be uninteresting; but it would be very difficult and dull" (Riddles of Science, 1932). Even on the grayest of days, the human mind struggles to imagine a life destitute of color. However, sometimes imagination isn't required. Damage to the visual cortex can bring about Central Achromatopsia, a defect in color perception that renders the world into a "dull, dirty, faded, gray, washed out" wasteland like something on a black and white television (Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, Readings on Color, 1997). Besides being less pleasurable, a colorless world would be more difficult to navigate. Color experts Vernon Lee and C. Anstruther-Thompson explain how inhabitants of a colorless world would be strangers in a strange land: "Color gives the eye a grip, so to speak, on shape, preventing its slipping off; we can look much longer at a colored object than an uncolored; and the coloring of architecture enables us to realize its details and its ensemble much quicker and more easily. For the same reason colored objects always feel more familiar than uncolored ones, and the latter seem always to remain in a way strange and external; so that children, in coloring their picture-books, are probably actuated not so much by the sensuous pleasure of color as such, as by a desire to bring the objects represented into a closer and, so to speak, warmer relation with themselves" (qtd. in The Enjoyment and Use of Color by Walter Sargent, 1964).

by WTL Photos

Even people without the faculty of sight must take color into account, Walter Sargent notes, "because they hear about it as one of the distinguishing qualities of objects." He cites the American activist Helen Keller, the first person with deafblindness to graduate from college. Keller used her imagination, analogies, and senses of touch, smell, and taste to develop her own conceptions of color. As she explained:

I understand how scarlet can differ from crimson because I know that the smell of an orange is not the smell of a grape-fruit. I can also conceive that colors have shades and guess what shades are. In smell and taste there are varieties not broad enough to be fundamental; so I call them shades. There are half a dozen roses near me. They all have the unmistakable rose scent; yet my nose tells me they are not the same. The American Beauty is distinct from the Jacqueminot and La France. Odors in certain grasses fade as really to my senses as certain colors do to yours in the sun. . . . I make use of analogies like these to enlarge my conceptions of colors. . . . The force of association drives me to say that white is exalted and pure, green is exuberant, red suggests love or shame or strength. Without the color or its equivalent, life to me would be dark, barren, a vast blackness. (qtd. in The Enjoyment and Use of Color by Walter Sargent, 1964. Emphasis mine.)

Though blind to the physical world around her, Keller could not and would not allow her thoughts to remain colorless. She always asked for things to be described to her in terms of color, so that she could imagine their resonance. "The unity of the world demands that color be kept in it whether I have cognizance of it or not," she explained. "Rather than be shut out, I take part in it by discussing it, happy in the happiness of those near me who gaze at the lovely hues of the sunset or the rainbow."

The COLOURlovers library testifies to the fact that even colors and palettes seemingly devoid of pigment can be interesting.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]