Though I don’t try to make a big deal about it, the fact is I am colorblind, red green and brown. What does that mean? Technically that means the cones in my eyes don’t register the colors that many others see. By the way, if somebody discloses they are colorblind, don’t pick up the nearest object and ask what color is it, that is so annoying. The earliest experience I noted was about 4 or 5 years old and my father would be driving and comment about waiting for the stop lights to turn green. I never saw green but rather a dirty grey light. I could never understand why they ever were called it green. I just learned at a young age people saw colors that weren’t there. Fast forward to Middle School and one weekend I worked on my masterpiece to date. A beautiful whitetail deer. I remember getting every detail, every line and every shading just right. By Sunday I finished it and was quite pleased with myself. Monday morning I went to school excited to share it with my teacher Mr. Harmon. He studied my piece and seemed impressed yet puzzled. “Mati, why did you color the deer green?” he asked. I was stunned, I had no answer, I didn’t even know how to find and answer. Kids started to file in the classroom and they looked at the picture with the same reaction. “Who draws a green deer?” they asked with a snicker. I realized that for the first time the world saw colors that I didn’t. Though I loved being creative, soon after that experience I began to steer clear of using any colors. The last memorable experience related to colorblindness was when I was about 20. I had commented to my wife that I loved my old pair of running shoes except I could do without them having pinkish color to them. She looked at me and said they were grey and there was no pink in them whatsoever. Once again I was dumbfounded at what I saw and others didn’t.
My colorblindness is not absolute. If I were to dump out all the tubes of paint that are red, green or brown I can probably get close to 100% sorting them out without looking at the names. Cadmium Red is the same red I see on fire trucks, Hookers Green is the same green you can find in a lush grass lawn. Yet as a nature lover I never see deer by virtue of their color, only by their movement. Their brown blends so well with all the browns, greens and greys of the forest. I recently shared I a painting I did, “Six Brothers of Superior” with a close painter friend. He shared the many things he loved about that painting, “and Mati the greens tones in the boulders are amazing!”. There was no green in the boulders. I don’t remember using green and I certainly didn’t see any green. I have learned that certain hues and tones of colors will escape me. Sometimes they appear in my work without me knowing. Painting with intent is important to me, and to have a color appear as something else to somebody else is frustrating. You can take two of my favorite colors Thalo Green and Paynes grey out of the tube and they are dangerously similar to me. I have to take extra care when using them for a specific color in a painting or blending them with other colors.
I have all my paints sorted about by colors in their separate boxes. I think I have more greens than any other color and love looking at them and asking myself what I see. Florescent Green is the color when a leaf is lit up by the sun from behind, Hookers Green is the color of thick moss growing on a log deep in a swamp and Thalo Green I find in the horizon of a night sky on a cold winter night. I have learned I can see green. But it is the hues and tones you get when you start mixing color that quickly derails my confidence in what I seeing. That being said I love to turn the tables once and awhile and when I have a particular hue that I sense has green it, but it is hard to tell, I will ask someone. Half the time I find they struggle as well, and they aren’t color blind and they know why I am asking for help. Colors are more complex than people realize. Just look at something and ask yourself what color I would use to create that? It is not as easy as you think.
Some have suggested that it makes my paintings more interesting knowing that I am colorblind. I never really understood that. What I do understand is painting is about using a host of senses to include relying heavily on my emotional and intuitive senses. It is also about making dozens of decisions including what colors to use. I have made peace with the color green, or brown or red. I am aware that these colors can escape me and for the most part when they do, they do little to damage the dynamic qualities of the painting I am trying to capture and sometimes they accidentally enhance it. Being an artist is about accepting that your paintings will never be perfect. In my case I have been lucky that more times than not, mistakes of any kind lead me to a more dynamic place. What I have learned is that painting is about creating a vision through yourself by creating the world you see around you and inside of you. I have had a number of close friends now say that they look at the world in a different way after seeing my paintings, and there are times that they will see something and remark to themselves, “That is a Mati painting.” To me that is the ultimate compliment. In life so much is about looking at things and seeing the world around you. Not seeing various colors is a loss in some respects, however I as a painter am able to see much more in life which others do not, a blessing I don’t take for granted.
Metsa Studio 