Hal Fielding
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Gallery 4
Copyright © 1999, Hal Fielding
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The spectrum and the natural world.
There are good reasons for thinking that a precise recognition of all the colours we are capable of discrinimating has often been a matter of indifference. Languages have never been used for labeling more than a tiny fraction of the millions of colour-sensations which most of us are perfectly well-equipped to enjoy and, we might have supposed, to name. A glance at a standard modern handbook of colour names, such as A. Maerz and M.R. Paul's Dictionary of Color, which lists and represents mainly English-language trade-names, will show that although most of us are perfectly capable of discriminating among an extensive continuum of colour-nuances, very few of these nuances have been named, and modern colous systems, following the lead of James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860's, have usually resorted to numbers in order to distinguish perceptable differences of hue or value in what has turned out to br a far from sysmetrical colour-space.
From "Color and Meaning", John Cage
