ABSTRACT
What do we see ? The common-sense answer is that we see the objects that are before our eyes. But when we ask how we see the house over there, we learn that what we actually see is sunlight reflected from the house into our eyes. Do we see objects or do we see light? Do we see the colours of objects or the colours of light? This last question is a very practical one to the painter. Suppose his subject is to be a white cow lying on the green grass in the shade of a tree. He sees the cow to be white and the grass to be light green, but if he lays on pure white for his cow and light green for his grass, he has altogether lost the shade of the tree. To repro duce the picture that he has before his eyes, he has to darken the cow and the grass, he has to paint the white cow grey, and the light green grass dark green. The painter has to learn to see lights and shades and the colour of the light, instead of the colours of objects. It is a difficult task for the novice in painting to see light and the colours of lightwhich might be called picture colours-and to get away from the customary seeing of objects and their colours. For ordi nary purposes it is more useful to see the colours of the objects themselves than to see the picture colours which those objects deliver to the eye at any moment. There is no doubt that ordinarily we go as far as we can away from seeing light and towards seeing objects.
