Week 2. Comments about "Case of the Color-blind Painter" by Oliver Sacks

"Case of the Color-blind Painter" by Oliver Sacks tells a story about Mr. I, a 65 year old artist who runs into a misfortunate car accident. It soon comes to his attention that he had completely lost his sense of seeing color. Even for a normal person this must be devastating, but for an artist... it must something that goes beyond my words. I feel sorry of the poor guy. He absolutely adores color, and his life and livelihood revolves around color. I think it’s bad enough watching Schindlers' List for two hours.

The text gives initially painfully and unpleasant insight to Mr. I‘s damaged receptors. The value of colors in things that normal people do not appreciate at all become obvious and disgusting, as described by Mr. I. Through many tests and procedures, the narrative provides us with information that color, is not necessarily physically existent, but created in our own minds. Sure enough I knew that different objects emitted different wavelengths of light, but it did raise questions to why objects appeared differently in alternatively lit environments. The article did clarify some of these issues, but then conclusion raised a few more… so it’s helpful, yet now I got more things to think of.

The text does throw a lot of scientific facts at you, and I do feel they are very long winded and sometimes it there leave me in a daze. I did do a humanities degree, not a science course. Nonetheless, the facts presented about how color is how we perceive things really made me come to a realization about how we view things.

As a designer, I think it’s fair to say that without color, we will be stuck on a very two dimensional plane. Void of life and relevance. In the texts, colors is defines as our total experience and how it is link tour own values and categorizations. The relevance of the texts is that we should not take color for granted and really start looking around and remembering colors. We need to learn to absorb their emotions that are associated with it.

Rather than saying what everybody else saying about how sorry we feel for Mr. I, though he is in an unfortunate situation, I’m going to go on a tangent and prove the much lesser quality of the world if we were not given the gift of color. We couldn’t even picture the mere thought of color, it’s like a forth dimension that that never really existed. There will be a definite void of variance in nature. I don imagine a grey rainbow or waterfall is really pretty. However I guess it will be perfect of a robot world. Everyone does their job and everything is formulated. Designers, if they would even exist, will have to be really creative with shapes and tones. Therefore, based on the world that Nordby and Mr. I described, life would be pretty dull without color (pretty dull… hmm punt intended).