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DISCOVERING THE FUNDAMENTALS OF OUR VISUAL WORLD -
or how we came aware what our eyes see
359 years and counting, as I am writing this.
That is the amount of time that has passed since Isaac Newton conducted experiments in Woolsthorpe Manor, England. In the year 1666, Great Plague started spreading in London, and Cambridge University was closed as people fled to the countryside, Newton among them. During his stay at Woolsthorpe, Newton made several remarkable discoveries in the field of science, that would launch us towards the modern era.
Visual artists, today, tomorrow, and hundreds of years from now, can mark that year as the beginning, a starting point that has led to all the possibilities, in tools, knowledge, skill sharing and career opportunities in different fields of visual art that we can enjoy today.
Whether it is creating special effects for movies, TV shows, gaming industry, or 3D sculpting and rendering in a virtual world.
Graphic designing in commercial fields, filters in social media applications. The ongoing possibilities of photoshop.
You name it. Photography, light shows, drawing etc.
Thru our history as a mankind, there have always been individuals that are built with the deep urge, a passion to create visual art. Playing with shapes from architecture to product designing. From fashion trends into a new tattoo.
Attempting to capture a moment, or an event, or maybe a vision from imagination. Recreate and share it with others as an image. It probably provoked curiosity towards the world we live in, what it is made of and how everything happens beneath the surface. It is no surprise that as our intelligence and understanding evolved, artists and scientists eventually crossed paths.
At the age of renaissance, art itself became a visual study of the world and the phenomenons it included. Art began to transpose visually into a more realistic form, describing the behaviour of light and matter.
Yet, the mystery of light and colors remained unsolved for centuries, until Newton started his experiments with the glass prism. In the experiment, he allowed a single beam of light enter the room, and he shined it thru the prism. As the light entered the prism, it was split into several rays of colors, this action is called refraction. From this, Newton introduced the term ”color spectrum”, to describe what he saw.
And even though the colors refracted without any clear borders or boundaries between them, Newton chose to divide them into seven different colors based on the observable appearance. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. Later on, after several trials using additional prisms, he was finally able to reconstruct the colors into a single beam of light.
This experiment proved that white light contains all the colors of the rainbow, and furthermore, that the color of an object, is something that is determined and affected by the source of illumination. In a more simple way, color does not live in the object, color we see is the result of the object rejecting that specific range of light / color.
This rejection is described as reflection.
We will get back to this and the significant importance it holds. Newton finally published his theory of light in a book, ”Opticks” in 1704. This was due to criticism he faced after the first announcement back in 1672. During the time there were two main theories of what light is, both sides had their own supporters amongst scientists and both sides had some evidence supporting their theories. However, both of the theories had numbers of problems as well, although interesting subject, we will not dig deeper in to it in this article.
So Newtonˋs theory explained how color of an object is affected and determined by the source of light, and how that object appears, is in direct relation to the objects ability to interact with that light source. I know, this might sound complicated and boring, but trust me, understanding the big picture makes a huge difference in the end. And it should, interaction of light and matter is the most fundamental part of our visual world, and the only thing we see when we open our eyes.
We will jump to 1725, after the impact of Newtonˋs optiks that revolutionized the idea of what color is, another book was published, Coloritto. This book presented the very first subtractive color model, RYB,( red, yellow, blue ) but it was not yet referred to be subtractive at the time, it would take more than 100 years before we understood where it is based on.
You are familiar with this model even If you donˋt realise it, this is still widely taught all over the world to children how to mix colors. Mix red and yellow and you get orange, mix yellow and blue and you get green,red and blue, and get violet… … well not really.
We might get something close to lavender,or a very deep dark color, but pure violet or purple is nearly impossible to achieve this way.
Author of Coloritto was a French-German painter Jacob Christoph Le Blon. He developed and presented a new trichromatic process for printing images in full colors back in 1708. In his book, he stated that all visible objects can be represented in paintings by using only three colors.
Red, Yellow and Blue - For all colors can be mixed from these, which he called Primitives.
This method was the precessor for the present CMY ( Cyan, Magenta, Yellow) that most of the printers use today. RYB was widely adopted by artists at the time and it inspired scientists from different fields to study the nature and behaviour of colors in trichromacity.
Tobias Mayer, an astronomer from Göttingen, introduced a color triangle based on this. In this model, red, yellow and blue are placed on the corners, and can be refined by adding black and white, creating a double pyramid and sort of a 3D color model.
Nearly 100 years after Newton began experiments in Woolsthorpe Manor, at the year 1760, another book was published, titled as ” Photometria ”. Author of the book was Johann Lambert, a polymath generally identified as either Swiss or French in nationality. In Photometria, Lambert introduced a concept of perfect diffusion, that carries his name, known to us as ” Lambertian reflectance ”.
As mentioned before, the conclusion, that we observe interaction of light and matter, led to studies on what type of interactions there are. Each matter behaves individually and in specific ways with light, one observable form of behaviour is reflection.
Lambert introduced a new term ” albedo ”, to describe materials ability to reflect light. This term is still in use today in 3D sculpting and rendering. Glass, mirrors, and metals reflect light differently compared to fibers, stone and wood.
We can understand it more easily by comparing terms glossy or matte. Generally, we can think of the difference between them with how the light is being reflected from their surface. With Matte, the way it reflects light is called diffusion, and with glossy it is specular. Looking at image of glossy, it shows a smooth surface. As the light coming from one angle collides with the surface, it will bounce off in similar angle related to the incoming light. It creates highlighted accurate form on the area where the reflection happens, this reflection highlight appears in different location depending on the angle we observe it.
In image with Matte, it shows that the surface is not smooth. So as the light collides with it, it is being reflected in different directions, this results that the form of the highlight will not appear as accurate or it might not appear at all. Paper is good example of this, since it will appear to be equally bright no matter the angle or location it is observed.
Lambertˋs work with the behaviour of light and matter in principle, have been for me, one of the most fruitful subjects when choosing materials or the medium for the artwork and the process of creating an image. After all, the same rules that apply to the subject I am drawing or painting, apply to my materials of choice. The biggest part of the physical drawing or painting process, is just a reconstruction of the conditions of appearance.
Rearranging my materials with the medium to match materials behaviour with light, either in reality, or the photo I chose as reference…. and sometimes just from my imagination with abstract ideas.
Whether you like it or not, or If you even think about it, ultimately your finished work is the representation of the behaviour of light and matter. Lambert also realized that the chosen primary colors might have different coloring powers and produced his own 3D color pyramid based on the work and discoveries of Tobias Mayer.
By the year 1777, science already had made discoveries to the point where physics alone cannot explain our experience of the visual world. We knew that it had to do something with us as biological creatures, something in us, the way we measure and observe these physical phenomenons.
Eventually, two Londoners, George Palmer and John Elliot, who apparently never met each other,were the first to present the idea of trichromacity in human vision with several publications between 1777 and 1796. At the same time a new force to be reckoned with, entered the world of science, followed by discoveries that would help future advancements across the fields of science, and yet, us ordinary people necessarily have never herd about him.
Enter the picture Thomas Young.
In 1795 - 1796, he attended physics lectures in the University of Göttingen and came familiar with the colormetric researches of Tobias Mayer that included, colored after-images, boundary colors and simultaneous color contrast, as well as Lambertˋs work. In his opinion, artists had much better understanding of color and the complications affiliated with it, than regular scientists at the time.
Based already on the fact that they can produce and play with colors in a simple way with the RYB model, and after all, the model itself was invented by Le Blon, who was also a painter. He was aware of the predictions of Palmer and Elliot, and eventually 1801, clearly formulated that we are trichromatic creatures, and we must have three different kinds of receptors for detecting colors in light. Young also challenged Newtonˋs theory theory of light, pointing out that corpuscular theory could not easily explain why different colors of light are refracted to different degrees. Young came up with the basic idea of the famous double-slit experiment to demonstrate interference of light waves, that proved with solid evidence that light acts as a wave and not like a particle. He also used all his data to calculate wavelengths for different colors of light, coming very close to modern values.
Young played a huge role in different fields, apparently he learned to read by age of two, and was teaching himself Latin at the age of six. Young presented his first paper at the Royal society at the age of nineteen and by the year 1801 he was made Professor of natural philosophy at the Royal institution. In the next two years he delivered over hundred lectures on hydrodynamics, astronomy and physics.
It is no surprise that he is referred to as ” the last man who knew everything ”.
1802, English chemist William Wollaston became the first person to notice number of dark features, like lines in the solar spectrum. Eventually he suspected them to be appearance of some sort of boundaries of colors in the spectrum. Over ten years later, 1814, Joseph von Fraunhofer would discover them aswell.
Von Fraunhofer was a German physicist and optical lens manufacturer. He had invented a modern spectroscope, and as he made experiments with it, he discovered a bright fixed line, which appears in orange color of the spectrum when it is produced by the light of fire. After this he turned his attention to sun, wondering If the same line would appear in the solar spectrum.
He rediscovered the same dark lines that Wollaston noticed, and began to systematically measure their wavelengths and eventually mapped over 570 lines. As he kept investigating the light sources of the sky, he detected that those dark lines are also appearing in the spectrum of several stars, but in slightly different arrangements. The conclusion he made was, that the lines must carry information about the light source, regardless of how far the source is.
A new area of study was born, stellar spectroscopy. This it what Hubble and Webb space telescopes do.
About 45 years later in 1859, Gustav Kirchhaff and Robert Bunsen noticed that several of those Fraunhofer lines coincide with bright emission lines that were found in the spectra of heated chemical elements. They inferred that those dark lines are caused by absorption of the chemical elements in the solar atmosphere.
In other words, the lines spesifically describe what the source is made of.
Light interacting with the environment, how cool is that. At this moment it still might seem too far fetched, too distant idea to have any practical relation with such a simple thing as drawing. However, drawing is simplified study of observing superficially the same thing. This proved that light interacts in a spesific and predictable way as it collides or passes thru matter. Letˋs go back to think about color of an object.
What we know so far, in most cases , is that red object is red because it reflects that color of light, but where do rest of the colors of light go? Now you know, they are being removed by the object.
The object absorbs rest of the colors, only thing that it does not absorb in this case is red light. We can inspect this idea in superficial state very easily, since we have so much different colored LED lights everywhere in our modern environment.
Looking at this image, Red object is red, because it rejects red light and therefore reflects it.
When we change our light source to green, the red object becomes dark. There is no red light that it could reflect, and because it removes other colors by absorbing them, it acts like a light switched off.
Observing another image.. We can inspect what is happening with materials.
And your chosen medium does the same, recreating the interaction of light and matter. The reason when mixing complementary colors together, results that they cancel each other, is simply because we did not add reflection of light, but we mixed material that removes all light. This is known as subtractive color model.Oh, and the 570 lines that Fraunhofer discovered, today about 25 000 lines are known to exist in the solar spectrum.
Every type of matter reacts in a certain way with the light, beyond our observable range. But we are getting sidetracked here so letˋs stick with the main idea of this article, which is to present sort of timeline of the discoveries that our experience of visual world is made of.
25 years earlier, 1834, in Leipzig University in Germany, Ernst Weber first proposed what eventually would be known as Weber - Fechner law. Weber was a physicist and he was the pioneer of experimental psychology. The most remarkable work he did was with the study of human sensory system.
He noticed that when a sense is being stimulated, and the stimulation is increased, it would take larger increase of intensity to produce a just-noticeable-difference. In a more simple example, If you hold a 100g object in your hand, then in your other hand the object has to weigh at least 108g before you notice which one is heavier.
That is the meaning of just-noticeable-difference.
But why this is important to us? It applies to all senses,vision is one of them,but the required increasement in intensities related to each other, is different with each sense.
For example, If we draw or paint, we should not measure or evaluate what we are doing until we are at the point, that we are able to make accurate comparison. I am sure you have ended up in a process of vicious cycle, endlessly going back and forth, adjusting things. Or starting by trying to immediately finish one part correctly, eventually getting frustrated and abandon the drawing/painting.
The significancy of Weber-Fechners work, comes from understanding what methods are in visual art, a process of working towards a desired result. Idea of method is, that If you follow the steps, you will end up close to a certain result. The method is there to avoid you from falling into traps when you do not aknowledge the existence of them.
Earlier we went thru Thomas Young and his prediction of trichromaticity being biologically part of us. James Maxwell was also fascinated with colors and became familiar of Youngˋs work in his student years at Cambridge University.
Maxwell wanted mathematically prove Youngˋs theory of three color system correct, and he first created a tool to trick the human brain. He made a disc that proves, when spinning right amounts of red, green and blue simultaneously, the colors would seem to melt together and form white. This experiment showed that there is a difference when mixing colors in light and mixing colors in pigment. This experiment would evolve to finally become a concept of additive and subtractive mixing of colors. From this concept, he figured out that photos could be produced in color as well, using Red, Green and Blue filters.
And what he did after that?
He produced the worldˋs first permanent color photograph in the year 1861. This gave birth to a modern color system RGB, the same system that is the base of our TV ˋs, phones and screens the size of buildings. But simultaneously, this marked the separation point with art and science in the root of co-existance that began with the era of renaissance.
From this point forward both would go on their paths. Science would no longer necesseraly require artists to create an image of experiment in realistic form, but also artists were free to explore and express, not just in realistic appearance, but whatever their imaginations and emotional states would like to present. Few years later, 1865, Maxwell published ” Dynamical theory of the electromagnetic Field ” where he declared electricity, magnetism and light, as different manifestationˋs of the same phenomenon.
Maxwellˋs equations predicted that light could have an infinite number of wavelengths, suggesting that light exists at energie levels beyond our visible spectrum, known as the electromagnetic wave theory of light. This can be considered to be the beginning of quantum mechanics, and it layed the foundation for Einstein to later create his special relativity theory.
Einstein described Maxwels work as the ” most profound and fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton ”.
We have finally made it to the end of this article, but our journey is far from over with this subject. The number of leaps that we were able to take from this point forward, require an article of itˋs own, dedicated to the 1900ˋs alone. However, even with these fundamental functions that were discovered, are more than enough for an artist to explore and play with.
You can argue with what I left out or included so far, but as an artist, I would say that these discoveries lay the most crucial foundation of what our visual world holds. Light and matter, our visual system for observing it and the subjective sensory system that controls how we gather that information for processing the final image in our brains.
How and what we process, and even the computing interface of visuals, is something for the next article on the timelapse of the history of our modern era with visuals.
Sincerely
Mikko
