pg. 215
"Have special pity for anyone translating an ancient Greek text. So-called Greek 'colour words' have no direct English equivalents. Worse, they don't refer to colours, relating more to texture, consistency and quality, with colour a small, often irrelevant, part of the whole meaning. The sea is the colour of wine, but so are sheep. Honey, sap and blood are all chloros which, as far as we can tell, is a sort of yellow-green. . .IF we look for a wider meaning for 'chloros' we find that it can also mean 'fresh', 'fluid', and 'living'. . . The odd thing about Greek poetry (and Homer's Iliad in particular, the best, earliest and most substantial example) is that the metaphorical meanings are the only meanings employed."
pg. 217
"The idea of pure colour could hardly have existed in the acient Greek world. Only a handful of pigments were available to them: white, blue-black, red and yellow-green. These, according to Empedocles, were the primary colors: those from which all others were made. (if you play with the precise pigments to which he refers, you really can generate a full spectrum of colour, albeit a rather muted one.) The Greek world was not saturated, as ours is by artificial colour. The Iliad is a rich compendium of surfaces, reflections, mists and tricks of light. Why should the ancient Greeks have separated out colour for special emphasis, rather than texture or lustre?
This same lack of interest has been encounter recently; in 1971 a team of Danish anthropologists went to Polynesia to study color perception among islanders. But in one village, they were told, 'We don't talk much about colour here.'"
pg. 226
"A complementary colour is the color which, when added to the original color, generates white light. A colour and its complementary will do this because under their mixture all cones are being stimulated equally."
"On the painter's palette, something different happens. The more pigments are added, the less colour information the mix contains. Pigments swallow most wavelengths of light; its is the wavelengths they do not absorb which bounce into our eyes. . ., the more colours we mix in, the duller the result: eventually all wavelengths of light will be absorbed by at least some of the mixture."
phttp://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6022651776430144605#editor/target=post;postID=2292615608809464574g. 228
"... the sensation of red can be generated by removing all bluish wavelengths and enriching the yellowish-green part of the spectrum. The fact that red is patently more than this formula is striking evidence that colour is neither an objective property of objects nor of the light they reflect: it is a construction of the mind."
pg. 229 - 230
"Light an object with a red light: it appears to cast a green shadow. Light the object with a green light, and its shadow appears red. Shine a yellow light, and a blue shadow is cast. A blue light casts - well one wants to say a 'yellow shadow, but oddly, there is no such thing; instead the shadow appears brown. It is one of the foibles of the eye that it perceives dim yellow as a separate colour. "
"Dazzled by brightly lit patches of one particular colour, the brain is somehow being tricked into filling the shadows with a complementary colour... This observation reveals a whole new order of colour; a system of antagonistic pairs, in which the absence of one colour brings forth the sensation of another, so that the blue 'opposes' yellow, and red 'opposes' green."
pg. 231
"Hering realised that the eye renders light and dark by comparing the light levels in neighboouring regions of space. This awareness enabled him to describe how browns and olive greens arise, even though no mixture of lights in a darkened lab can generate them. When yellows and greens are surrounded by areas of great illumination, browns an olives appear; they are seen as mixtures of black with either yellow or green. To interpret these colours correctly, we need context. Look at a brown or olive surface through a long, non-reflective black tube you will see either orange, yellow, or green. The dun, 'earthy' quality of the colour is quite stripped away."
pg. 236
"Context is everything. The eye has no interest in absolutes levels of illumination, nor in absolute colour values. Every colour is perceived in relation to every other, just as every patch of light is perceived in relation to every patch of shade. In the real world, this makes colours remarkably stable."
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