Although the Arnheim reading was full of interesting information and completely upended most of my conceptions about color and light and how they’re related, the one thing that stuck with me most was his description of a particular experiment in which “children were presented, for example, with a blue square and a red circle. They were asked whether a red square was more like the square or like the circle. Under such conditions, children up to three years of age chose more often on the basis of shape, whereas those between three and six selected by color. Children over six were disturbed by the ambiguity of the task, but more often opted for shape as their criterion” (335). I was interested by the explanation provided. According to Werner, the youngest children are mostly influenced by motor behavior and so the “graspable” shapes are more influential, while children between the ages of three and six have more developed visual characteristics and are drawn to colors rather than shapes. Werner also claims that children over the age of six gravitate back to shapes because of cultural influences. They are being “train[ed] in practical skills, which rely on shape much more heavily than on color” (335) and thus turn their attention to what will be most useful. It was this particular theory that most caught my attention. I have to wonder if this phenomenon really is a matter of cultural influences or if it could be a manifestation of another stage of brain development. I think that it is quite possible that cultural emphasis on practicality is responsible for a choice of shapes over colors, but I think it’s equally possible that it’s more of a biological development. After all, as evidenced by other species’ ability to perceive more or less color, it seems that perception of shapes is more relevant to a species’ survival. If that’s the case, then it would make sense that as a person moves closer to maturity, to being self-sufficient, they would naturally focus more on the aspects of a situation that could influence their survival.
On another note, Sacks’s story of the colorblind painter struck me in a few ways. At first, the idea of food becoming inedible because the colors were wrong seemed strange to me. After all, it would still smell and taste the same. But then I remembered this one time when my dad made green oatmeal for St. Patrick’s day. The oatmeal tasted perfectly normal. Logically, there shouldn’t have been a problem. But nobody ate it because it just
looked wrong. Granted, in this case the food coloring actually made it look moldy, but I have a feeling that if he had turned it blue I would have had a similar problem. There’s a saying (which is often quoted on the Food Network) that “you first eat with your eyes” and I think Mr. I is living proof of this. I also wonder if this is something he has gotten over with time. Sacks describes how he has adapted to many aspects of his condition and how he would not regain his ability to see colors if given the choice, but I am curious as to whether he still prefers to live on black and white food.
Livingstone’s discussion of luminescence also reminded me of Mr. I. Sacks explains that he, along with many achromatopsia patients, not only saw the world in black and white, but that it was “wrong” and “dirty” and “impure” (7). I wonder if this has anything to do with luminescence. As Livingstone points out, most of the time when a color painting is photographed in black and white it loses much of its luminescence and tends to fall flat. I wonder if this is exactly what was going on with Mr. I. After all, he had much less of a problem with things that were already in black and white, things that were either designed in a way so that the luminescence carried through into the grayscale or things that had already lost that quality, whereas looking at something in color, something that hadn’t already been filtered for him, was disturbing. This is purely speculation, of course, but the dull pictures in Livingstone’s book, such as the black and white representation of Monet’s
Impression Sunrise, had a flatness and wrongness that reminded me of what Sacks describes in his article.
The greyscale version shows the yellow square to be almost equiluminant with the white space, which gives it a vibrant and quavering quality, as compared with the red and blue squares which due to their darker luminance appear more stable and grounded in their respective positions in the upper left and lower right corners. We notice that the smallest colored square, the blue, is also the darkest. Perhaps the red square needs to be bigger and longer in order to counterbalance the density of the small, dark, blue.
