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Was Vincent van Gogh color blind? (2012)
- scotty79 4y agoOr https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i5/Van-Goghs-Fading-Colors-Inspire.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i5/Van-Goghs-Fading-Colors-I...
- mtts 4y agoThis is about his fading pigments. There are letters of his where he acknowledges that he uses bad quality paints that are likely to fade, which is why he uses stronger colors than he knows he should. The linked article (which has very few pictures, this link to work by the original researcher has much more: https://asada0.tumblr.com/post/11517603099/the-day-i-saw-van-goghs-genius-in-a-new-light https://asada0.tumblr.com/post/11517603099/the-day-i-saw-van... ) is about something else, namely a form of color blindness that distorts your vision in ways that are a lot less obvious than the way more common red/green or even blue/yellow color blindness. I’m not an expert, of course, but to my layman’s eyes the “corrected” images look much, much better than the u corrected ones (you’ll need to see them indoors, however, on a reasonably good screen, to truly appreciate the difference). Uncorrected van Gogh’s work always strikes me as flat, lifeless and therefore amateurish. The corrected ones have much more depth and therefore, while garish, strike me as much more competent.
- lupire 4y agoThe major effect is excessive green in the originals, which becomes a shade of yellow in the adjusted versions, which fits into the context. I'd like to see a follow-up that uses pigment analysis to identify exactly where that green is used and how much, and similate modifying it.
- erpellan 4y agoIs it me, or do the protanopia (top right) and deuteranopia (bottom left) images look identical? If I’m colour-blind this would be a weird way to find out.
- v413 4y agoYep, looks like they are the same.
- gubby 4y agoThey look identical to me too, but I know that I can perceive RGB hues.
- jiggawatts 4y agoThey look identical to me too, and I'm 100% certain I have full colour vision.
- throw827474737 4y agoThis is more a test for reading-blindness than color-blindness :D
- amelius 4y agoSame here, and I just took an online test to verify.
- OJFord 4y agoAll except the blue-yellow (bottom right) images look the same to me, in both examples. And van Gogh's 'Starry Night' 'filtered to simulate colour blindness' looks the same before as after. I am colour blind. Now, if only someone could filter it to simulate non-colour-blindness for me, so I can see what they see!
- lupire 4y agohttps://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/color-blind-glasses.htm https://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/color-blind-glasse... allaboutvision.com/conditions/color-blind-glasses.htm
- OJFord 4y agoI'm curious how well that can work, but not '$200 to $450' curious. I wonder how many people actually have enough of a problem with it to get these - it's not like you're suddenly going to be allowed to fly fighter jets after all.
- tgv 4y agoIs there any ailment they haven't tried retroactively diagnosing Van Gogh with?
- SmileyJames 4y agoHIV
- bregma 4y agoCovid-19, although it may just be a matter of time.
- arkitaip 4y agoWait til you hear that Van Gogh is actually the person we know as William Shakespeare...
- Beltalowda 4y agoAs the famous Albert Einstein quote goes: "there are many dubious diagnoses of van Gogh on the internet".
- sandworm101 4y agoFunny colorblind story. Back when I joined the military i had to do every eye test imaginable. I was already deep into a multi-month recruiting process when they sent me for an "update" at a base. The medic handed me one of those color dot flip books, the ones with numbers hidden amongst the dots. I read out all the early numbers easily but then hit a page of colored dots with no discernible pattern. Seeing my career ending before it could even begin, as the medic reached for the book I locked onto it with a death grip. "Can't see any numbers? Your done." "No! Give me a minute. I know I'm not colorblind." "No. You are done. Only people who are colorblind see numbers in the last pages." I had bent several creases in their book.
- yarg 4y agoThere's a genuine military use for colour-blind people. They're better at detecting camouflage than trichromats.
- sandworm101 4y agoBut not in the trade for which I had applied. Any trade involving extensive maps/charts, and everything associated with aircraft, are usually closed to those suffering common forms of colorblindness.
- Rediscover 4y agoTell me about it. During basic training (1983) the sgt was introducing us to camouflage. Something like "Out there are twenty soldiers hiding and you can't see them!" Me: Raises hand, "Permission to speak? Yeah, there's one there, and there, and over there..." Sgt: "Your colorblind, right? Drop and start pushing the ground down until I'm tired."
- mcv 4y agoAnd after pushing the ground I hope he made you the designated camouflaged-enemy spotter? This is a really cool superpower to have. I honestly had no idea that this was a thing, but I guess it makes sense; colour blind people do see colour, but they see it in a different way, which could be leveraged to spot things people with normal vision don't. I guess that also means that every squad should have one colour blind person, and camouflage should be designed to foil colour blind people too. Of course there are different kinds of colourblindness, which makes things more complicated.
- diego_moita 4y agoNo. The article just says "these 2 guys say Van Gogh was color blind". One of the links is 404, the other is in Japanese. And the article doesn't present any evidence. I went to Van Gogh's Museum in Amsterdam last month. A color blind wouldn't be able to do what that guy did. It is really a "seeing is believing" experience. Most photographies can't capture the very little nuances in color hues that you can only see in the real picture. The blue/white one with the cherries in blossom and the ones with the sunflowers are the perfect example of it.
- HHest 4y agoThe link labelled as "seen some of van Gogh’s work in what he calls a color vision experience room" is a better link than the one labelled as "a number of striking examples of the master painter’s works reimagined"
- StrictDabbler 4y agoVincent Van Gogh understood color so well that he made paintings that dissected the essence of our color perception. He was hanging with Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec and Gaugin. He wrote thousands of letters, mostly about his paintings and the usage of color, and his painter friends wrote him back. Quick excerpt of a letter to Theo: "I still often run up against a blank wall when undertaking something, but all the same, the colours follow one another as if of their own accord, and taking a colour as the starting-point I see clearly in my mind’s eye what derives from it, and how one can get life into it. Jules Dupré is like Delacroix in landscape, for what enormous diversity of mood he expressed in symphonies of colour. Now a seascape, with the most delicate blue-greens and broken blue, and all sorts of pearly tones. Then an autumn landscape with foliage from deep wine red to vivid green, from bright orange to dark havana, with yet more colours in the sky in greys, lilacs, blue, white, forming another contrast to the yellow leaves. Then again a sunset in black, in violet, in fiery red. Then again more capricious, like the corner of a garden by him that I saw and have never forgotten; black in the shadow, white in the sun, bright green, a fiery red, and then again a dark blue, a bituminous greenish brown and a light brownish yellow. Truly colours that can have quite a lot to say to one another." Here's the most important part of that letter: "Still, it doesn’t satisfy me. To my mind there’s far more behind not doing it in the local colour. True painters are the ones who don’t do it in the local colour — that was what Blanc and Delacroix discussed once." At the time the impressionists were discovering that our color sense is counter-intuitive. They were developing methods of painting a color by using contrasts near a gray to imply the inverse color, etc. That's what he means by not "[doing] it in the local color." You put red by gray and the gray looks green by contrast. To look at those paintings and say "I guess he painted this way because he couldn't see the color right" is incredibly ignorant. His choices were deliberate and he documented them in excruciating detail.
- tgv 4y agoWhat happened here? This was submitted a few days ago, but shows 5 hours. My other comment is three hours old. I was sleeping at that time.
- GravitasFailure 4y agoHello! We've been trying to reach you about your time machine's extended warranty. Not sure what exactly happened, but if you search for this post through algolia, it shows the post being a few days old.
- kuschku 4y agoApparently one of the moderators revived this thread? I remember reading this same thread a few days ago as well.
- nkurz 4y agoThe article went through the "second chance pool", and the timestamp was changed. To make this less jarring, the timestamps for the comments are "relativized". More details can be found among Dan's comments here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20timestamps%20re-up&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- lupire 4y agoChanging all the timestamps into lies is annoying and obnoxious. I makes everyone feel deja vu about "new" comments that aren't.
- machina_ex_deus 4y agoI'm color blind, and painting and picking colors was always a frustrating experience. I remember as a kid accidentally picking green olives color for painting something brown, and having a confused teacher asking me what am I doing. It should be very obvious that a color blind person painted something, he'd mix up greens and reds and browns in ways that look strange. Around brown it should be the most obvious, look for olive green mixed in brown. I obviously can't do it myself tho.
- gsich 4y ago>colorblind >red/green deficieny choose one
- stoeckley 4y agoI watched the Willem Dafoe movie (At Eternity's Gate) about van Gogh recently and there appear to be a few subtle hints at this theory of him as colorblind; a few scenes that show something off with his sense of color, without directly saying anything about it. It was rather interesting, which made me search for more on this topic, which took me to this article.
- koreanguy 4y ago
- koreanguy 4y ago
- TrapLord_Rhodo 4y agoColor Blind is an annoying term that needs to die. It doesn't happen so much anymore as I and those around me get older, but when i would say i'm colored blind they would take it at face value. "You can't see any color at all?!?" Then i'd have to back track and say "No the word should be "Color Different/ difficient". I have 3.5 cones that choose where color lies on my spectrum, where you have 4." One might say, i don't get the various hues and brightness of color in losing that .5, but i would say i see entirely different colors than you. There's no way hues and brightness can lead to the conversations i've had about whether that color is red or green, blue or purple, yellow or green. What's funny is there is almost no way to truely understand the difference in consciouss awareness of the world, even as something as simple as color.
- cjak 4y agoI use an analogy with perfect pitch to illustrate colour-blindness to those with regular colour vision. People with perfect pitch can be played a note on a piano, and identify it sight-unseen. "That's a C-sharp", they'll say confidently. Most others can tell if a note is higher or lower than another, or can pick an interval. Regular colour vision is perfect pitch for colours. Most folks can identify a blue or a green in isolation, but some like me can only see relationships between colours (one is "bluer" or "greener" than another).