Video Resource

Seeing Color: Object, Light, Observer

Subject

Duration

Over 120 minutes (combined running time)

Language

Request a DVD

The DVD includes the film Seeing Color, plus additional background information about the artists featured (including Nardo di Cione, Sam Gilliam, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Sean Scully, Titian, and Joseph Mallord William Turner). Other segments explore pigments, optics, the physiology of color vision and perception, and the history of color theory from Aristotle to the 20th century. This film is available to be licensed to affiliates.

(closed captioned)

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A pale-skinned young woman with copper-orange hair, wearing a turquoise-blue robe, stands in a pastel-infused landscape in this stylized, vertical painting. The woman fills most of the left half of the composition. She faces our right in profile with her head bowed as she looks down at the silver and brown box she holds in her right hand, closer to us. Her body angles away from us so we see her back. Her hair is held back under a gold-colored headand, and her blue robe falls over a white skirt. Beyond her, rocky mountains in ice blue and pale lilac purple span the horizon, which comes about three-quarters of the way up the painting, beneath a pale, rose-pink sky. An area of mottled parchment-white to our right of the person could be a field. Along the bottom edge of the canvas, rounded and organic shapes in scarlet red, turquoise, lapis blue, golden and lemon yellow, and pumpkin orange could be abstracted earth or flowers at the woman’s feet.

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