An improbably humorous exploration of color theory

(15) Wound Licking and Other Scientific Followup

In a manner that I suppose is common among the troubled, I entered a phase of treating the entire matter as if it did not exist.

I did not write any more letters; I did not impose on any more friendships. To all outward appearances, I became a more balanced--even somewhat normal--individual once again.

But eventually, thoughts of my cobbled-together color theory began to return. With time, it came to seem that almost anything could touch these thoughts off.

For example, I found through personal experience and a bit of random inquiry that virtually nobody's color computer printer produced hard copies that looked much like the colors they had created on their computer screens. Why had this problem gone uncorrected for so long? Was it possible that the problem was in the underlying theory?

Other thoughts about color theory seemed to just come (pardon the expression) from out of the blue. For example, there was the time when it occurred to me to check if there had been anything resembling today's color process printing at the time Newton made his formulations. I found that process color printing--the kind that makes use of the funny, pinkish-purplish "magenta" red that had become so fundamental to my own interpretation of how colors work--has only been with us since the invention of color photography.

In other words, if Newton had wanted to know about mixing pigments, the only people with practical experience he could have asked would have been painters—who very likely conceived of red as the firetruck color, and thought of primaries as the palette whose use would continue well into the twentieth century, even in the hand of the modernist Piet Mondrian.

Finally I realized that my predicament would never simply go away. I would need to devise another way of resolving it. I would need to find someone with enough expertise to tell me if I was really onto something, or if I was just some hoohah with an odd personal theory.

© COPYRIGHT 1993 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.