The Mind's Eye
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How tricky the mind's eye can be. I’m always trying to understand the chameleon-like effects of simultaneous contrast better, trying to understand how this visual chicanery plays with my perception.
Simply put, when the eye cannot find the balance it seeks, it manufactures a color to achieve it. The spontaneously generated color exists only in the mind. We call these color shifts we experience “successive contrast” and “simultaneous contrast.” To understand simultaneous contrast, let’s look first at successive contrast.
Remember back in elementary school how thrilled we were, after staring at a black square on white paper, to then see on the inside of our eyelids a white square on a black background? Or better yet, seeing a bright green square after staring at a red square! The phantom color we see behind closed lids is produced by our equilibrium-seeking eye. Like a judge who has weighed and settled the case, it orders the complementary color to appear to balance the situation. This is called “successive contrast” because the balancing act is completed in sequence, successively.
Simultaneous contrast is the sleight of eye the mind plays when you look at more than one color simultaneously. One color can force another to seem to change shades. Again, the eye wants balance, so it will see nuances of color that don’t actually exist.
In “The Art of Color,” Johannes Itten writes of how costly this trickery can be:
“Some years ago, the manager of a weaving mill called my attention, in desperation, to some hundreds of meters of costly tie silk that would not sell because a black stripe on a red [back]ground looked, not black, but green. This effect was so pronounced that customers insisted that the yarn was green.”
Though I know the theory of such dupery, I’m not always aware when its happening to me. It's hard, if not impossible, to know when the mind’s yogi, who is constantly seeking inner balance, is tipping the visual scales- unless you can measure the colors objectively. So I like to keep my eyes on a steady workout routine, training them not only to see better, but to also perceive what they may not want to perceive.
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