“Eurocentric paint” is an imprecise phrase. I first read it as meaning “traditionally-used European paints”, with the implication that other cultures chose their colors based on different paints. But the rest of the post makes clear it’s the idea of basing colors on paints that’s allegedly Eurocentric; so the better phrasing might be “Eurocentric fixation on paint”.
One reason the artist’s primary colors work at all is due to the imperfect pigments being used have sloped absorption curves, and change color with concentration… Another reason the correct primary colors were not used by early artists is they were not available as durable pigments. Modern methods in chemistry were needed to produce them.
Granted, I was taught those colors in conjunction with being given paint to play with, which is a good reason to teach them. But it’s still a bit striking that at no point in my education was I taught any other set of primary colors, except implicitly by picking RGB colors in MS Paint (an ironic name, in context).
I’m pretty sure that the common intuition among my classmates, way back in childhood, was that the first-tier colors were red, yellow, blue and green. This turns out to be supported by a relatively sophisticated color theory based neither on natural occurrences of colors nor on any means of producing colors but rather the brain’s fundamental abstractions for processing them.
“Eurocentric paint” is an imprecise phrase. I first read it as meaning “traditionally-used European paints”, with the implication that other cultures chose their colors based on different paints. But the rest of the post makes clear it’s the idea of basing colors on paints that’s allegedly Eurocentric; so the better phrasing might be “Eurocentric fixation on paint”.
I was taught in (US) school that the primary colors were red, yellow, and blue and the secondaries were green, orange and purple (which matches the ‘rainbow’ in the comic, though the ‘rainbow’ I learned was ROYGBIV). Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory#Traditional_color_theory, this only works with paint:
Granted, I was taught those colors in conjunction with being given paint to play with, which is a good reason to teach them. But it’s still a bit striking that at no point in my education was I taught any other set of primary colors, except implicitly by picking RGB colors in MS Paint (an ironic name, in context).
I’m pretty sure that the common intuition among my classmates, way back in childhood, was that the first-tier colors were red, yellow, blue and green. This turns out to be supported by a relatively sophisticated color theory based neither on natural occurrences of colors nor on any means of producing colors but rather the brain’s fundamental abstractions for processing them.