Tomato, Tomahto

Perspectives from The Artist’s Road

For many years now, Ann and I have had a running debate about the color green. Specifically, the greens I mix and use in my landscape paintings vs. the greens she mixes for hers. She thinks my greens tend toward the too-blue side and I often find that her greens, especially in foliage, tend toward the too-yellow. She claims that she just sees the colors differently than I do, and to that, there is no logical rebuttal. We can never see eye-to-eye, so to speak, on this subject, and now we may know why.

There is an article by Libby Copeland from the Smithsonian magazine that reveals new research on the differences in perception and visual acuity between the sexes. Neuroscientists, led by Israel Abramov at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, administered a series of visual tests to a group of men and women, and the results are illuminating. Abramov spent fifty years studying human vision and the neural mechanisms that determine how we perceive colors.

While men have an advantage in detecting distant…