Between Glare and Abysmal Dark: Toward a Conversation on Colour Appearance

Abstract

As a geographer, urban designer and a town planner my concern is with our increasingly placeless townscapes. I am particularly concerned by the use of inappropriate colour, including some ‘heritage’ colours, made worse as the forces of globalisation standardise and erode the sense of locale and local community. Communicating colour appearance as opposed to paint colour is difficult, particularly as people see what they know, know what they see, not what appears. By working towards a way of communicating colour appearance as ‘events’ in all their richness, I hope to make it possible for people to have a constructive conservation based on shared concepts. When people understand what others are talking about, the possibilities of identifying and addressing the shortcomings of our townscapes becomes real. I have attempted to go back to basics and look at my environment with an ‘honest eye’. I try to communicate my experiences of colour appearance (the events in time and place) as they are and to identify parameters of colour appearance that exist. Likewise, with two exceptions, my photographs are direct digital simple mode ‘snaps’ for this paper, unedited. This paper establishes a set of parameters from my personal observations which need testing in a sympathetic forum. I need feedback to find out the extent to which my conclusions resonate with other people before I can move on developing a diagrammatic means of communicating colour appearance.