I would love to know what are not only the finer distinctions within the spectrum that she can see but what are the upper and lower limits.
The normal visible spectrum for humans is between 380 nanometers and 700 nanometers.
I’m aware that retinal receptors work by a totally different mechanism than sound receptors in the cochlea, but I’ve always wondered: Why is our limit just below an octave, and what would an octave of color look like?
Is that likely where our “band of yellow” is for us 3 cone folks? Like we see all green and she gets to see a whole new color there?
In the end, that’s what matters most. Or used to. Anyone can make art. Whether they are tetrachromates or blind. We can choose to disagree whether or not her art is “good”, I don’t think it is, myself. I can explain why if you care (doubt you do, you seem very militant in this discussion.)
What clearly matters more is that she is very good at marketing, which is the only art form that really matters anymore in this age of post-modernism.
Color vision is, as you say, pretty weird(both in that you can reliably get people to disagree on how to describe a specific wavelength or pigmented surface under specific lighting; but also in that the weirdness of the fact that “red” is something you experience; while “625-750ish nonometer electromagnetic waves” are what exist in the world is commonly an early intro into the fact that qualia are deeply baffling).
Her case is probably even weirder, though, because so much of the modern environment(emissive displays, reflective printed and painted goods; and phosphor mixtures designed to coax light that looks right out of fluorescent bulbs or LEDs) is carefully crafted around working with(and sometimes exploiting) the characteristics of ‘standard’ human color perception to get results.
I’d assume that she and I would see different things even in a sunlit field or a rock lit by an incandescent bulb; but I’d assume that we’d see radically different things when looking at something under a fluorescent bulb whose phosphor mixture has been carefully tweaked to provide the best color rendering index possible for a light source that starts out as just some relatively hard UV; but which didn’t even consider someone with different color sensitivity. (By way of a more common example that has gotten enough commercial attention to get standards bodies interested; people run into this problem when using LED lights in film because cameras, digital or photochemical, do not see the world precisely as humans do; so the clever tweaks designed to make mostly monochromatic light sources function as acceptable white lighting that work well on humans can have unpredictable results on camera).
One expects that similar oddities might occur with the assumptions built into RBG and CMYK printing systems; as well as digital displays(which commonly have garbage colorspace support even by normal human standards, unless you are going upmarket; but absolutely aren’t designed with wildly uncommon superhumans in mind).
It mattered just as much during modernism, the regency era, the northern rennaissance and the qing dynasty, I guarantee you. Also is “good at marketing” just because she got featured on a blog? Cause I’m not seeing it. The lady is an art teacher who sells originals at street vendor or cafe prices. Do you get bent out of shape when people who are good with their hands teach ceramics or blacksmithing classes and sell things at craft fairs, or is it only painting that gets the weird pretension around it?
One of the things I used to love about this site most was its supportive maker community.
Apparently, only makers who can get through the “prove to me you have talent” gatekeepers here are allowed.
We even had a tetrachromat Happy Mutant contribute to the thread and the gatekeepers were too busy pounding their chests to listen to her.
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