If you’re not busy take a minute to consider these thoughts. I found a book the other day that was full of questions. It’s got more questions in it than a ten year old’s homework. You know the kind I mean; questions like that hoary chestnut; ‘if a tree falls in the woods and there is no one about to hear it, does it make a sound?’ That’s an easy one. The falling tree creates sound waves that vibrate in the air. If the tree was on the moon where there is no air that would be a different story.
Here’s another one; ‘is a painting (lets say it’s da Vinci’s Mona Lisa that just happened to fall off the back of a truck) that you keep hidden in the darkest recesses of your cellar where no one can see it, a work of art?’ Now that’s a tricky question. Do works of visual art exist in the dark? I once saw a painting by a Russian by the name of Kasimir Malevich that was just large Black Square. Wasn’t much to see.
It wouldn’t matter much if that was in the dark but what about the Mona Lisa? Who dares say it is not a work of art in the dark?
Here’s a curious thing, visual works of art need light. Painters often choose to work where they can use the sunlight for their painting because sunlight contains the full spectrum of colors. A few years back a fella by the name of Isaac Newton did an experiment. He used a prism to reflect sunlight into a spectrum of colors and showed that all our colors exist in white sunlight. Smart boy, I reckon.
It’s strange when you think about it. All our colors exist in white sunlight. You’d think that some of the colors would dirty up the others but they don’t. This is because individual colors are expressed as wave lengths which are a particular kind of electromagnetic energy. The human eye can only perceive light wave lengths between 400 and 700 millimicrons.
Not only did Newton use a prism to show a continuous band of color from red through orange, yellow, green, blue to violet, he collected these waves by using a converging lens and projected a white light again. Now you can’t do that with paint. You can’t mix red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet pigments and get white. Why do you suppose that is? Here’s the surprising thing. There’s no color in pigments. Wait a minute, that can’t be right. If there’s no color in pigments, there’s no color in paintings. What’s going on here?
I’ll see if I can explain. You see that nice new red car sitting in your drive. The one you just washed. Why do you suppose we see it as red? We see it as red because the molecular constitution of its surface absorbs all light rays but those of red. The red wave length in the sunlight is reflected back at us. The car does not have color in itself; light generates the color. Color arises in the human eye and brain.
Painters are often concerned about how their works are hung in galleries and Museums because they want their work to be seen in the proper light. While light globes cannot project the full spectrum of sunlight they come close. Halogen lights and incandescent lights are the most common. Fluorescent lights, while energy saving, are unsatisfactory because they project a limited spectrum.
So what about the Mona Lisa sitting in the dark; is it a work of art? Well, if being a work of art has something to do with the colors the pigments reflect then the Mona Lisa is not a work of art in the dark.
Launt Thompson
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