Are We Over the Rainbow? | An Interactive Conversation with Jeff Atherton

Free Event

For humans, is color based solely on its wavelength? If it were, our visual world would be a mash-up of constantly shifting colors as the light reflected back to our eyes shifted wavelength over the course of the day. Your car would be one color in the morning light, and a different one in the afternoon—not to mention what color it would be under the fluorescent showroom lights of an auto dealership…way too much information.

So how do we do it? How do we create a stable color world when the wavelengths coming off objects fluctuate wildly? In this talk and demonstration, Atherton will present some answers to these questions. On the way, he will take a look at artists who have understood the power of color, applied with an eye towards perception rather than wavelength.

Jeff Atherton is Assistant Professor in the Foundation Program at the CSULB School of Art. He specializes in two-dimensional composition and color theory. His interest in color perception received a jumpstart in 2002 when he was asked to demonstrate the relationship between color and light to a group of German national merit students. Since then, Atherton has been at work on relating current theories of human perception to an applied color theory for artists.