(8) Seeking Solace in Reading

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Perhaps emboldened by the results of my experimental investigation, I decided to give the writings of other researchers another whirl.

This time, though, I took pains to use the library at Cal Tech.  (After all, I wanted to see what had been written by smart researchers.  Who could tell about the other book?  Maybe it had been written by trainee researchers, or intended for use by illogical students.)

I also went beyond the textbook level.  I took great pride in locating something more on the order of a paper--or at least, the closest thing to a scientific paper that I could actually read and comprehend.

I suppose it was actually a sort of heavily annotated and explained outline for the rational teaching of color theory.  It had been prepared for a scientific and technical organization by a group that included somebody who was apparently a whiz on the science of color for Kodak.

"Aha, Kodak!" I thought.  "If they don't know about color, who does?"  (I temporarily disregarded the memory of those Thanksgiving pictures taken in the TV room at halftime, where Aunt Thelma appeared such an unusual shade of purple.)

I felt another small boost when the authors derided the clumsiness of talking about one set of colors as "additive primaries" and another as "subtractive primaries."  (The first textbook had done exactly that! Ha!)

But by far the most intriguing idea put forward in this document was that, at least theoretically, virtually any set of three colors would do equally well as primaries, provided they were all visually equidistant from one another.

I wasn't quite sure at first how this could be, but it seemed to hold the key to whatever initial claim to respectability the "hypothetical additive" admixtures in my experimental paintings could hope to make.

© COPYRIGHT 1993 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED