Lightness and Brightness and Other Confusions

tinctions and colour similarities. Perceptual colour systems make it possible
to systematically describe perceptual patterns of colours in a spatial context.
KARIN FRIDELL ANTER’s 32 surveys of perceived colour of painted facades may
serve as an example of that kind of studies. (Fridell Anter 2000).
Concepts describing colour and light as integrated in a spatial whole have to
be based, however, on coherent spatial experiences. Spatial perception demands
spatial relations and directions, size gradients, enclosure, etc. DAVID
PRALL 33 remarks that
[y]ou cannot make a spatial whole except with elements the very nature
and being of which is spatial extension – – The elements must lie in an
order native to their being, an order grasped by us as constituted by relation.
We call structures intelligible – – so far we find them capable of
analysis into such elements so related. (Prall 1936, p 39).
Colours as such have no spatial extension. They have no formal structure
except colour qualities related to other colour qualities (i.e. contrasts in lightness,
whiteness, blackness, hue or chromaticness). If colour phenomena are
abstracted from their natural connections to light and spatial order, causal
relations behind them become inconceivable and mystified.
A possible starting-point for concept forming for colour and light in space
could be the phenomenological/psychological tradition, with concepts such as
DAVID KATZ’s 34 definitions of spatial modes of appearance of various colour
and light phenomena (Katz 1935), Gibson’s concepts of ecological optics (Gibson
1979) and Alva Noë’s concepts of enactive perception (Noë 2004). The
noticeable correspondence between Katz’s phenomenology and Gibson’s
ecological optics indicates a possible way to a coherent ecologically based
phenomenology of colour and light and a well defined conceptual system in
spe of describing colour and light as parts of a human experience of the
world.
In this respect artistic visual experience is of a considerable value. Painters
and lighting designers are experts in colour and light phenomena. The observations
of spatial visual qualities that they take as a starting point for their
studies of pictorial space have not been paid attention to and have not been
studied systematically. Painters and lighting designers aim to construct logical
expressive symbols for appearances of colour and light in space. (Klarén
2006, p 294). They study the perceptual coherence of order and significance;
intuitively they use it and present it in their works. Art represents a special
32 Swedish colour researcher, 1950 -
33 American philosopher of art, 1886 -1940
34 German psychologist, 1889 -1953
30