DRAFT: Interaction of Color, picked up off a stoop

I got a copy of Interaction of Color, the 50th anniversary edition, by Josef Albers. I picked it up on the walk back from the Q station — 7th Avenue, the stop right after Atlantic. It's about a fifteen or twenty minute walk back to my place.

Along the way I kept noticing books outside the brownstones. The brownstones in the neighborhood are beautiful, and people are always putting things out front for free. Normal spring cleaning, I guess. A lot of the time it's books.

I picked this one up because it looked exactly like my kind of thing. It looked like the type of book that revisits a fundamental topic in a new way, trying to expose some intuition about it that gets ignored, or glossed over, or is only known to people who are very knowledgeable about it.

I opened it on the way back and got through some of the foreword and some of the introduction. When I got home I read the first chapter.

Practice before theory

The introduction lays out an approach to understanding color — what color is, how you use it — and the approach is to start with the practice. With the practical implications and consequences of color, in order to develop an intuition, to start training our eyes and minds to color in an abstract way. Not the color of something. Just color. The theory follows from the practice.

My favorite line:

This book, therefore, does not follow an academic conception of theory and practice. It reverses this order and places practice before theory, which, after all, is the conclusion of practice.

TODO: Check this quote against the book. Transcribed from memory, so the wording may be off.

Chapter one: color recollection

Chapter one is extremely simple. One page, titled "Color recollection — visual memory." It brings to light the fact that the memory of color — the experience of a color you're not currently perceiving — is subject to enormous variation from person to person. So much so that it earns the first chapter.

Try to recall what red is. Then put something red in front of you. Then consider that other people might be seeing something different, because of the way the physical stimulus gets interpreted by their brain.

The most interesting thing to me was the second point at the end of the chapter:

Second, the nomenclature of color is most inadequate. Though there are innumerable colors — shades and tones — in daily vocabulary, there are only about 30 color names.

TODO: Check this quote too, especially the number. I have seen a different figure cited elsewhere.

That reminded me of something I heard once, about how many ways there are in Mongolia to describe a horse — the color of a horse, specifically. To me they'd all be brown. To someone who has those descriptions available, that horse can be a variety of different things. Same for colors, then. That's what he means by the nomenclature of color being inadequate.

TODO: Track down where the Mongolian horse thing comes from, or cut it. Right now it is "something I heard once," which is honest but weak.

I always like thinking about how language can limit the thoughts we're able to have. It's not a hard limit — things can always be described in the compound, by metaphor or by expounding on them — but the simple vocabulary you reach for first does shape what you notice.

A small experiment

The chapter talks about how much the selection of a color will differ person to person when you're told something like "red is the color of the Coca-Cola sign." I think it'd be fun to actually try that.

Put an image, or just a bit of text, in front of someone. Give them a palette and ask them to choose the right color. See what they come up with, and see how much it varies. The more people who do it, the more interesting the spread. You could even show the image and then ask for the selection immediately afterwards.

It seems simple enough to build. I do wonder how screens come into play — that would wreck the color right there. But it could still be nice.

TODO: Add a photo of the book, maybe on the stoop where I found it or on the walk home.

TODO: Decide whether to actually build the experiment before publishing. If it exists, this post should link to it instead of describing it in the conditional.

Excited to read more of this book.