Colour blindness, Creativity, the advantages

Colour blindness, what happens when your normal colour vision switched ‘off’?

Castelnau de Montmiral paintings
The Promenade (2)

Colour, a fine record of success, many distinguished people and renowned companies chose Frickers paintings as you can discover by reading my illustrated résumée.

When correctly viewed there are advantages in what is emotively called  ‘colour blindness’.

Total colour blindness is very, very rare.

Of the 11 % of males and 3 % of females who experience ‘colour blindness’ most have a deficiency, handicap if they make it so, not full on colour blindness.

They experience colour but not as ‘normal’ people do.

This can be a disadvantage however it begs the question how come evolution has allowed this, are there advantages.

Colour Blindness, what is it?

The answer Gordon Frickers and his mentor Francis Pratt discovered is yes there can be exceptional advantages.

Colour blindness is almost always hereditary.

A number of famous artists, Monet and Degas being but two, were ‘colour blind’.

As a painter with anomalous colour vision it has been a long hard voyage for me, Gordon Frickers to learn to paint using colour combinations some thing like ‘normal’ people see.

Colour mixing for all especially for artists

In that I had been quite successful by 1989 so arrived at the Painting School of Montmiral as a recognised marine artist.

There were though issues I did not understand, colour responses of which I could make no sense.

It was those dilemmas that drew me to the unique expertise of Francis Pratt.

Having tested my colour vision Francis initial reaction was “you can’t possibly be a painter“.

We worked together both making many discoveries, for examples how I see or rather don’t see certain types of camouflage so an not fooled by them and how I see colour at night.

Francis developed new ideas about human colour responses.

He eventually concluded I was actually very lucky because my anomalous colour vision actually gave me a different but very rich colour experience so was quite likely part of the reason why I reacted so strongly to colour in painting and photography.

Painted on location this is one of two pictures produced plien aire while studying form and anomalous colour vision at the Painting School of Montmiral.

The trees were deliberately distorted in part inspired by lingering visions resultant from reading J R Tolkins ‘The Hobbit’, the colours were pushed towards but not into extreme.

I have written about colour in some detail on my pages ‘Colour is hugely important to all of us’.

Colour and the artist Gordon Frickers

Colours in Gordon’s paintings have distinctive, resonating, enduring qualities in part because Gordon Frickers has an unusually rich form of colour vision.

These are qualities, gifts he has in common with some of the greatest past masters including Cézanne Degas, Dürer, Titian and Rembrandt, Monet.

Gordon Frickers is one of the very few artists invited to created a one man show of (35) paintings (May 2011) at the European Parliament, Brussels, an impressive addition to his list of exhibitions in other prestigious venues in Britain and Europe.

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Gordon Frickers © 21.05.2015 updated 25.02.2023

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