Re: [Phys-l] experiments with dyes (was: happy equinox)

[Michael Porter <listmoe@gmail.com>]

On Mar 24, 2008, at 11:11 AM, Marty Weiss wrote:
> Thousands of artists over hundreds of years are all wrong?
> Leonardo, DaVinci, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, Ms. Kennedy (my 9th grade
> art teacher), and so on?   were they all wrong?


You're suggesting that these artists believed that red, yellow and  
blue were the only three colours of paint necessary to create their  
works, and that they did so. This is obviously not the case -- most  
artists (the non-digital ones) use a variety of pigments, not just  
three. Maybe an art teacher, discussing the theory of colour, would  
worry about primary colours -- I doubt Renoir did.

I always thought that a casual glance at the true subtractive  
primaries might lead to the misconception -- cyan looks blue, magenta  
is kind of red...

Or maybe artists are just not that efficient. If you want to create  
any colour that the eye can perceive (or the brain, if you want to  
revive that argument from CHEMED-L), then C+M+Y (+black to thicken  
things up) is the *least* number of colours necessary. How many  
painters do you know have just those colours on their palette?

Mike

---
Michael Porter
Colonel By Secondary School
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada