A few thoughts on how color from an Artists perspective relates to color from a Scientists’ perspective. I have been listening to various lectures on quantum physics recently. I have been working to use some of its mechanics to explain how color on a canvas interacts with other colors on the canvas. I was intrigued to learn that they use a chromatic metaphor to describe the interaction of quarks within a proton or neutron, using the idea that within the way we perceive physical interactions would make quark interactions impossible unless they acted like colored lights do , red green and blue, to essentially cancel each other out and make white light.
So basically, I think, even at the subatomic level quarks form larger particles because of a principle of color mixing. I am no scientist, but the bare bones idea indicates to me as an Artist that there are greater implications yet to the world of color and color interactions, even on subatomic and infinitesimal levels, and we only chip the iceberg when we look at the obvious or surface interactions of color and form.
Another avenue of intrigue that came from the basics of field theory came from explaining existence as a liquid like fiend in which ripples sometimes merge to form particles which merge to form atoms which merge to form everything, all fluid parts of a rippling reality. Or something like that. Beyond the spiritual or metaphysical reflection on this principle, what it means as a way to explain color mixing could change how artists look at color and form by.
Let’s take a white canvas and call it the known universe, a field of reality in which all other realities exist. And then there is a ripple, the form of your making a mark on the canvas, and know the filed has globbed up a little and formed a particle. That particle is now the lone glob on an otherwise seemingly ripple-less universe, or is it? I contend that the red glob, interacting within its own field of existence with the field of the canvas, is generating other globs, fields of color, which our eye picks up on even if we have not physically added more color fields.
When you see a red blob on a white canvas, you are seeing an interaction of fields that generates energy, and that energy is interpreted by the eyes as optical color vibrations. You see pinks, basically. And where that red blob is placed on the canvas matters, the gravity of the white universe changes in our perception of it as the glob or globs move around within it. While we are well aware of how color reacts optically and changes with composition. seeing color interactions as real things, physical fields of space, can alter and broaden our explorations of Art.
This is essentially the basis of composition, I think. And the more you add, the next stroke of blue, for example, the more the fields interact creating exponentially more fields taken in by the observing consciousness. We sense some of these fields as emotions, and within the interaction of these fields is the reason color and Art move us so. If we then continue to layer, and add fields, the universe begins to ripple with a life that is ripe for the possibilities of “intelligent design” and I believe that it is within composing these ever increasing field interactions beyond the surface of a preconceived idea or image, we can find new dimension in which to interact within this expanding universe. This does not happen at the expense of representation, it can be used to evolve representation. The colors covered by other colors are still interacting in the field of existence and do so even as they are used to garner the larger scope of the composition.
The idea of fields and quantum physics serves to highlight the constants we know about Art, the power of interacting colors and forms. By expanding our scope of color interactions themselves with further depth than our predecessors, we can contribute to the greater cause of Art the way quantum physics does to the greater cause of Science.