Found Color

"[Painter Paul] Cézanne believed that light was only the beginning of seeing. 'The eye is not enough,' he declared. 'One needs to think as well.' Cézanne's epiphany was that our impressions require interpretation; to look is to create what you see. We now know that Cézanne was right. Our vision begins with photons, but this is only the beginning. Whenever we open our eyes, the brain engages in an act of astonishing imagination, as it transforms the residues of light into a world of form and space that we can understand. By probing inside the skull, scientists can see how our sensations are created, how the cells of the visual cortex silently construct sight. Reality is not out there waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind."

- Jonah Lehrer in Proust was a neuroscientist

Kim teaching a lesson on creating three-dimensionality
with color. 

When Kim first approached us, I wasn't quite sure what to make of her idea. "Photography is inaccurate," she told me over and over. In the ocean, you either have to accept the attenuation of red and yellow wavelengths (which means your photos look blue), or you have to add artificial light (which is by definition unnatural). Kim's art gets around that by painting the world as we truly see it - in color and in space. She doesn't draw lines; rather, she uses color to create three-dimensional shapes on a canvas. Like Paul Cézanne, Kim's art parallels how we perceive the world. 

The education/outreach program that Kim is leading in Palau, called Found Color, uses art to draw students out into nature. Cas, Matt, and I are assisting with the class, which inevitably means there's a healthy dose of science in there, too. The kids think we're teaching them to draw, but we're really teaching them to notice the world around them. 

Some of the torn paper artworks from our class

On the first day of the class, we started with a color-mixing exercise. Kim gave everyone a set of pastel crayons (craypas) and asked us to recreate the color of a paint swatch by mixing the craypa tones on top of one another. It was a challenging exercise, but I figured out how to blend the pastel layers together with my fingers. We then added different tones to make the color warmer, cooler, or to reflect an emotion. 

In order to get the students away from using lines, Kim then introduced an exercise with torn paper. Using only paper and glue sticks, we had to recreate a landscape. Paper pieces functioned the same as patches of color in a painting and forced us to use colors, not lines, to create form. 

The last skill our students needed was snorkeling. Kim had secured a large donation of fins, masks, and snorkels from Aqualung, so we outfitted the students and headed to Risong Bay. The sheltered bay is actually one of our study sites. I had a blast swimming around with the kids and teaching them to notice the corals, the sponges, and the fish around them. We even saw a sea snake! 

Found Color students after snorkeling in Risong

As the class develops, Matt, Cas, and I are functioning less as child-wranglers and more as students and participants. Using color to convey shape is not something I ever would have come up with by myself, and I am grateful for Kim's tutelage. I notice myself paying attention to the fine details of the reef more - how the light casts shadows, what species stand out, how shades of brown and beige vary across a colony. Found Color is adding new dimensions to our scientific observations in Palau!