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If there’s any artist who ever lived and knew color in his soul, it was Vincent Van Gogh. Almost mad with color, Van Gogh owned a box of different-colored yarn just so he could tangibly handle color and literally weave them together to determine how the combinations might look when put into paint. Walk through any Van Gogh exhibition on Earth and you’ll come out the other side drunk on color. But a Japanese medical scientist now contends that Vincent’s unique color palette was literally a function of his vision—specifically, a kind of color blindness. According to this researcher, Van Gogh’s unforgettable wheatfields and starry nights stick in our minds because they lack a color component most of us can see in nature. Is it possible that some of Van Gogh’s power to fascinate comes from a visual disability, or is this researcher demonstrating a different kind of blindness? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "
Was Van Gogh Color Blind?"
While flipping through Modern Furniture: 150 Years of Design, I couldn't help but stop and smile at seeing the same monobloc chairsitting on my backyard deck sitting there on the pages of a proposed history of modern furniture design. When we think of modern furniture design, we too often think of wildly experimental and wildly expensive items found only in the homes of the rich and famous. However, as Andrea Mehlhose and Martin Wellner , founders of the design company Fremdkörper and editors of Modern Furniture, show, modern design is all around us in such a ubiquitous way that we barely notice. Recognizing the power of design to simplify and change our lives can help us recognize a great deal of our culture. Modern Furnituredemonstrates that our furniture really tells us a lot about ourselves. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "
Our Furniture—Ourselves?"
[Many thanks to h.f. Ullmannfor the image above and for a review copy of Modern Furniture: 150 Years of Design.]
