Color is in the Brain of the Beholder by Arthur Raybold

Have you ever wondered why it is so difficult to get the board or its sub-committee on color selection to decide on a color to repaint the stucco or trim? An even worse scenario is to have a paint contractor paint half the side of a building color x and the other half color y and then let all 150 homeowners vote their choice.

That would be reasonable if the 150 all looked at the samples at the same moment , say 9:05 a.m. on Tuesday, November 7, 2000. Since the wave lengths of light change all day, the colors appear different at different times of the day.

Then there is the problem of context. You can't have 150 homeowners hanging around waiting for the two snapshots, one for each eye, to combine two images into a unified picture of the world. That contextual perception of color will be different from the snapshot the brain processed exactly at 9:05 a.m.

A recent article in the Dallas Morning News, reprinted in the San Diego Union Tribune's "Quest" section in August, discusses the above findings of two scientists from University College London. In effect, they are saying that two board members who stopped momentarily on their way to work to look at the samples saw one thing , while their retired counterparts with time to kill saw the same samples quite differently because their brains had plenty of time to assign colors to the "picture" of the samples.

Along comes a neurobiologist from Duke University Medical Center who says, "Color is interesting because it highlights the fact that what we see is nothing like what's in the real world." Also, "The physical world isn't colored. Instead, different surfaces reflect different wave lengths of light, which humans gather into a perception of color." Beau Lotto from Duke concludes that  "The Londoners help emphasize the difference between the world and people's perception of it: that there are almost parallel universes -the one out there and the one everyone has constructed to perceive the world out there."

This certainly makes all of our jobs easier. I don't have to carry a fandeck everywhere like a color caddie. I don't have to provide draw downs for property managers and association boards. I don't have to go to the expense of painting samples on the sides of buildings. The board and /or its color committee doesn't have to haggle endlessly with colorblind homeowners about color choices since none of us can easily agree with each other's snapshots or contextual pictures. We could be philosophical and just say, "Something in blue would be nice."

The difficult person at my old association who painted his trim what "appeared" to be a horrendous chartreuse without going through my architectural committee first and who later came to the board with 35 signatures of neighbors who supported his color choice (They could have cared less about the color; they wanted this color Nazi to leave them alone.) knew from the beginning that someday all his neighbors would see his chartreuse the way he saw it. They just needed lots of contextual time to get it right.

I've given all my paint manufacturers' representatives blanket orders to provide all my clients with a non-descript off-white, knowing sooner or later their buildings will look something like what they "had in mind."