A number of years ago I wrote a short text on how Dutch artist Barbara Collé employs a misconstrued notion of the physio-chemical effects on colour appearance to make an argument that the 'industrialisation of colour degrades our colour experience'.
I have now worked for a few months as a colour technologist for a major paint company, and I can only say that she was even further from the mark than I already understood at the time. In particular I'd like to further elaborate on a specific paragraph from her text:
'Any classical painter knows that you can get dark yellow to lean towards olive green by mixing it with some blue and red, or brown and green. But you can achieve this quicker by adding some black to it. This last option doesn't necessarily mean that you are killing the yellow pigment, but this is the case if you use Carbon Black. The yellow pigment that first reflected the morning light differently from the evening light, has become stable, or lifeless, in a single blow.'
The first thing I have to say about this is that 'the industry' makes olive green by mixing oxide yellow with oxide red and ultramarine. This is never done by mixing a yellow with carbon black. The reason for this is that the former is the cheapest and most reliable option.
Carbon black is markedly different from nearly every other pigment because at ~0,01–0,1 µm, its particle size is much smaller than nearly every other pigment, which particle sizes tend to range from ~0,1 to 10 µm. Carbon black is also completely apolar, and these factors make it difficult and expensive to predictably disperse the pigment evenly throughout a paint mixture, which is especially true for water-based paints. Time and money are leading factors in industry, so the industry uses the far more cheap and forgiving inorganic pigments whenever possible.
Ironically, these 'natural' inorganic pigments, unlike Carbon Black, are known for dulling, or 'dirtying', colours in mixtures. Their exact hue depends on difficult to control factors of crystal structure and dispersity, resulting in pigments that have a somewhat broad band of variable properties. The broader these bands are, the less intense a colour will appear.
At least in the case of olive greens, the dullness of the colour that Collé is advocating against is thus caused precisely by the use of the kind of pigments she would prefer.
The other remark I'm concerned with is the last sentence of Colle's paragraph. The play of light she describes has been extensively studied and is called metamerism in the scientific literature. Metamerism describes the different appearance of a colour depending on aspects like the viewing angle of the observer and differences in the primary light source.
In the paint industry, reducing metamerism is nearly always a concern, for obvious reasons. If you are in a shop choosing a colour for your kitchen, then you're not going to be thrilled when that colour appears very different than you expected once its on your walls. Metameric effects are even more pronounced between different kinds of paints, so it's also more than likely that your doors wont match your walls if you pay no attention to metamerism.
As reducing metamerism is vital when matching colours to a sample or between paints, it therefore shouldn't be seen as a negative in any paint applications that aren't artistic in nature.
The development Collé opposes to thus isn't driven by the evil corporations who are out to sap the world of fun, but rather by shifting consumer demand and expectations. It is not them, but us, who want the world to be controllable and predictable, and that predictable world is grey.
