To Grue or Not to Grue

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

A River 1888 Isaac Levitan

From time to time, I have been told by collectors and gallerists alike that people don’t like green paintings very much. That may be occasionally so, but my past sales of green paintings would indicate it is not a universal bias. Still, why would anti-green bias exist at all?

I’ve been reading a delightful book on the subject, Full Spectrum, by Adam Rogers. He lays out the centuries of scientific and physiological research behind our human perception of color. Daylight, which is made of photons in both particle and wave flavors, creates a broad colored spectrum of light we perceive as white, but of course, it is not only that. We see just the small spectrum of it which our eyes are equipped to see. The larger portion of the light spectrum is invisible to us, but it is still there in daylight. We know this because clever scientists have figured out how to measure this white light, both visible and invisible, as disti…