Color has always fascinated me. I was reminded of this yesterday when my mom sent me to the pit of doom to hang up 25 pieces of laundry (oh gnoes!). It was quite a challenge, until I found the baskets of laundry behind the door. It's much easier to do a job when you have the right materials. So, back to relating this to color. I had hung several shirts when I looked up and realized that I had subconsciously been hanging them in the order of the color wheel (incidentally, I purposefully do this very thing in my own closet, which probably explains why I started hanging everyone else's clothes that way). I had hung almost all the green shirts and had just put up a few blue ones. So I continued the trend and hung them all in color order! It made the job so much more interesting. Since it has been brought to my attention once more that I love colors, I'll ramble about it for a bit today. I'm sorry if you get annoyed by the fact that I'll be typing every color-word in it's color, but I just can't resist. I promise I probably won't do it again.
Just consider the very concept of colors for a second.
Aren't you fascinated? You should be. I mean, think about how it occurs. Certain molecules are shaped so that they reflect only certain wavelengths of light. The specialized cells in the eye then receive the waves of light and interpret them into this idea that we call color. See, look! They did it just then so you could read the word! Astonishing! Of course your eye only do this if you're not colorblind, and if you were I would show one of the shirts I received for Christmas and then laugh at the fact that you would have no way of knowing why I was laughing.
And then there's the whole idea of colored light and colored pigments being very different. We generally thing of colors in terms of pigments (or at least I do, since I've been working with them as paints and pencils for most of the past week), meaning that we think of the primary colors as red, yellow, and blue, and that white is the absence of pigmentation and black is all colors. Thinking about it this way makes me happy because it can be easily seen and tested by me with things I have sitting around that I really should be putting to other uses. At the same time, it gives me great joy to ponder colored light (which is much different) because I really don't exactly understand how it works, and being confused can be a pleasant relief. How on earth can green be a basic color while yellow isn't? I can grasp that black is the absence of colored light and, thanks to rainbows and prisms, I can see and accept that white light actually contains all colors, but how on earth would you get yellow light if it's not one of the basic colors? I tried to figure it out by making a custom color for my desktop since it uses the colored light system rather than the pigmented color system, and when I picked a pure yellow the boxes underneath told me that (and that whole spiel about boxes and custom colors probably made no sense, so just forget I wrote that if you're confused and move on to the main point of the sentence which comes after this parenthetical note) yellow is made of equal parts red and green. What!? When I mix equal parts red and green paints, I get a neutral greyish-brown color. Definitely not yellow. How? I think I'm going to have to do some research eventually, but I've been telling myself that for some time now. Someday I'll actually get around to it, for I can't just leave such a riveting question like this unanswered. Why do colored light and pigment divide differently anyway? I mean, if we see colored pigments based off of waves of light being received by our cone cells I guess my mind is just stuck in pigment mode.
Once you finish thinking about that, you can then consider the complexity of the eye and brain that allow the phenomenon of color perception.
And to finish up, you can hardly help but admire the creativity of a God who can invent the delightful concept of colors.
3 comments:
This reminds me of the pseudo-synesthetic composer Alexander Scriabin, who wrote a part for a keyboard instrument that projects colored light in his "Prometheus: Poem of Fire." This is also the musical work from which his Mystic Chord gains its other name, the Promethean Chord (C F# Bb E A D). It is my understanding, in fact, that he used his color system to write quite a bit of music.
I organize both of my closets the same way. I love rainbows!
I'm glad I'm not the only one. My family made fun of me for weeks after my sister went to look for a shirt in my closet and reported that it was easy to find due to the fact that it was organized according to the electromagnetic spectrum.
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